THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 
RIVERSIDE 


Shelburne  Essays 


By 

Paul  Elmer  More 


Fifth  Series 


In  libris  quccro  quid  sit  hominum  vita. 


G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New    York    and     London 

Cbe    Unfcfterbockec    press 

1908 


Copyright,  1908 

BY 

PAUL  ELMER  MORE 


tEbc  Itnicljerboclicr  ptesa,  l^cw  JJotk 


ADVERTISEMENT 


The  Centenary  of  Longfeli-ow  appeared  in  the 
Washington  University  Bulletin.  All  the  other  essays 
were  written  originally  for  the  Nation  and  New  York 
Evening  Post.  They  have  been  revised  and,  in  some 
cases,  considerably  enlarged  for  the  present  publication. 


CONTENTS 


The  Greek  Anthology    . 

The  Praise  oe  Dickens    . 

George  Gissing 

Mrs.  GaskeIvI.  .... 

Phiup  Freneau 

Thoreau's  Journai,  . 

The  Centenary  of  Longfellow 

Donald  G.  Mitchell 

James  Thomson  ( "  B.  V." ) 

Chesterfield   .... 

Sir  Henry  Wotton 


FAGB 

I 

22 

45 

66 

86 

io6 

132 

158 
170 
196 
228 


SHELBURNE  ESSAYS 

FIFTH  SERIES 


THE  GREEK  ANTHOLOGY 

It  is  true,  as  others  have  already  pointed  out, 
that  Dr.  Mackail  in  reediting  his  volume  of  Select 
Epigrams '  has  failed  to  take  advantage  of  the 
labours  of  certain  German  scholars  during  the 
intervening  sixteen  years/  and  has  thus  missed 
the  proper  historical  perspective  in  his  Introduc- 
tion. And  this  is  regrettable,  since  such  omis- 
sions leave  the  reader  with  a  feeling  of  uneasiness 
even  where  the  purpose  of  a  book  makes  the 
neglected  points  of  slight  significance.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  Dr.  Mackail's  volume  is  one  of 
the  few  really  excellent  works  of  English  (or,  one 
may  add,  Continental)  scholarship  dealing  with 

'  Select  Epigrams  from  the  Greek  Anthology,  edited 
with  revised  text,  translation,  introduction,  and  notes, 
by  J.  W.  Mackail,  professor  of  poetry  in  the  University 
of  Oxford.  New  York  :  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.,  1906. 
The  first  edition  appeared  in  1890. 

*  The  most  important  work  has  been  done  by  R.  Reit- 
zenstein,  whose  Epigramm  U7id Skolion  {Giessen,  1893)  I 
have  drawn  upon  in  this  essay. 

I 


2  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  classics  as  a  human  production.  Here  in 
brief  compass,  and  with  suitable  aids  to  com- 
prehension, one  has  the  substance  of  a  whole 
fascinating  hterature.  Just  to  have  rendered  the 
epigrams  so  closely,  yet  with  such  unfailing 
charm,  was  a  notable  achievement.  Still  more 
signal  is  the  accuracy  with  which  he  has  selected 
what  was  essential  in  the  great  bulk  of  traditional 
matter,  so  as  to  leave  in  the  end  the  impression 
of  something  closed  and  complete  in  itself  Exi- 
gencies of  modern  taste  compelled  him  to  omit 
the  more  characteristic  epigrams  of  Strato's  Musa 
Puerilis,  as  well  as  the  too  passionate  and  lux- 
uriant numbers  of  Rufinus,  which  might  seem  to 
form  an  integral  part  of  the  Anthology  ;  but  a  lit- 
tle reflection  will  show  that  these  ardours  of  the 
flesh  are  almost  as  foreign  to  the  heart  of  that  lit- 
erature as  would  be  the  more  classical  elevation 
of  mind.  If  he  has  erred,  it  has  been  in  the 
pardonable  direction  of  hospitality.  It  would  be 
hard  to  blame  the  maker  of  any  anthology  for 
including  the  perfect  epitaphs  of  Simonides,  and 
one  can  understand  the  temptation  which  led  him 
to  increase  the  number  of  these  in  his  new  edition. 
Yet  I  am  not  sure  whether  the  artistic  harmony 
of  the  book  is  not  a  little  marred  by  such  lines  as 
these  On  the  Defenders  of  Tegea: 

Through  these  men's  valour  the  smoke  of  the  burning 
of  wide-floored  Tegea  went  not  up  to  heaven,  who  chose 
to  leave  the  city  glad  and  free  to  their  children,  and 
themselves  to  die  in  the  forefront  of  battle  ; 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  3 

whether,  if  anything  were  to  be  added  to  the  sec- 
tion of  Epitaphs,  that  town  of  Arcady  could  not 
have  furnished  a  more  fitting  example  in  the 
verses  by  its  poetess,  Anyte  : 

No  bridal  chamber  for  thee,  nor  pride  of  marriage— 
but  above  this  marble  tomb  thy  mother  has  raised  a  vir- 
gin figure,  having  thy  stature  and  form,  O  Thersis  ;  so 
can  she  speak  to  thee,  even  dead. 

For  it  cannot  be  stated  too  strongly  that  the  real 
Anthology  is  something  far  removed  from  the  he- 
roic poetry  of  Greece,  something  in  which  the 
note  of  the  fifth  century  sounds  as  a  sharp  intru- 
sion. Echoes  of  the  older  poets  there  are,  of  course 
— Homeric  epithets  and  clear  reminiscences  of 
Lesbos  and  Teos.  And,  strange  as  it  may  seem, 
Plato  on  one  of  his  sides  comes  closer  to  the  spirit 
of  the  Anthology  than  does  any  other  of  the  great 
writers,  so  that  the  transition  from  the  opening 
scenes  of  the  Phcedrus  to  some  of  the  epigrams  in 
Dr.  Mackail's  section  of  Nature  demands  but  a 
slight  readjustment  of  the  mind.  Thus,  when 
Socrates  and  his  ardent  young  friend  come  to  the 
plane-tree  overhanging  the  Ilissus,  they  sit  down 
to  talk,  and  Socrates  says  : 

A  fair  and  shady  resting-place,  full  of  summer  sounds 
and  scents.  There  is  the  lofty  and  spreading  plane-tree, 
and  the  agnus  castus  high  and  clustering,  in  the  fullest 
blossom  and  the  greatest  fragrance  ;  and  the  stream  which 
flows  beneath  the  plane-tree  is  deliciously  cold  to  the 
feet.  Judging  from  the  ornaments  and  images,  this 
must  be  a  spot  sacred  to  Achelous  and  the  Nymphs ; 


4  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

moreover,  there  is  a  sweet  breeze,  and  the  grasshoppers 
chirrup  ;  and  the  greatest  charm  of  all  is  the  grass  like  a 
pillow  gently  sloping  to  the  head. 

If  anything  could  save  the  authenticity  of  the 
epigrams  attributed  to  Plato,  it  would  be  the 
similarity  of  tone  here  and  in  his  quatrain  of 
the  Anthology  beginning:  "Sit  down  by  this 
high-foliaged  voiceful  pine,"  Or  compare  the 
scene  of  the  Phcrdrus  with  this  longer  idyl  of 
some  unknown  poet : 

Here  fling  thyself  down  on  the  grassy  meadow,  O 
traveller,  and  rest  thy  relaxed  limbs  from  painful  weari- 
ness ;  since  here  also,  as  thou  listenest  to  the  cicalas' 
tune,  the  stone-pine  trembling  in  the  wafts  of  the  west 
wind  will  lull  thee,  and  the  shepherd  on  the  mountains 
piping  at  noon  nigh  the  spring  under  a  copse  of  leafy 
plane  ;  so  escaping  the  ardours  of  the  autumnal  dogstar 
thou  wilt  cross  the  height  to-morrow  ;  trust  this  good 
counsel  that  Pan  gives  thee. 

With  the  exception  of  that  tell-tale  word  weari- 
ness, Socrates  might  have  uttered  these  words  on 
that  memorable  day  when  he  and  his  companion 
walked  together  by  the  stream  of  Attica. 

The  resemblance  is  but  momentary,  of  course, 
and  the  graceful  dallying  of  Plato  is  the  balancing 
of  himself,  so  to  speak,  for  a  plunge  into  the 
depths.  His  conception  of  love  and  beauty  that 
follows  in  this  same  dialogue  is  as  widely  remote 
from  the  human  indulgence  of  the  pseudo-Plato 
of  the  Epigrams  as,  to  make  another  comparison, 
Bros,  the  subduer,  of  the  true  Anacreon  is  dif- 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  5 

ferent  from  the  mischievous  boy-Eros  of  the  An- 
acreontica  These  superficial  resemblances  merely 
serve  to  er  .phasise  the  contrast  between  the  grav- 
ity (the  GTtovSaio-crig  one  might  say,  had  not  the 
word  been  vulgarised  since  Matthew  Arnold's 
time)  of  the  genuine  Greek  literature,  and  the 
hghtness,  often  triviality,  of  what  supplanted  it. 
For  this  fresh  flowering  of  wit  is  not  so  much 
a  continuation  of  the  old  schools  of  poetry,  as  a 
new  genre  sprung  from  the  coalescing  of  two 
modes  of  expression  very  characteristic  of  Hel- 
lenic life,  but  hitherto  kept  in  a  subordinate 
place. 

From  an  early  date  it  had  been  the  custom  to 
enliven  the  symposium,  or  drinking  part  of  the 
dinner,  with  the  rivalry  of  song.  There  were 
regular  rules  for  the  sport.  A  subject  was  pro- 
posed, perhaps  the  lines  of  some  well-known  poet 
quoted,  and  then  each  man  in  turn  had  to  display 
his  ingenuity.  Another  form  of  verse  adapted  to 
the  more  religious  needs  of  the  people  was  the 
epigram,  or  actual  inscription,  whether  it  were 
the  brief  commemoration  on  stone  of  the  dead,  or 
some  prayer  or  word  of  thanksgiving  to  the  gods 
set  up  with  a  gift  or  statue  in  a  temple.  Great 
poets  did  not  disdain  to  exercise  their  art  in  this 
way,  and  a  few  of  the  genuine  epigrams  of  Simon- 
ides  and  his  rivals  from  the  fifth  century  are  as 
perfect  as  any  work  of  human  wit  can  be.  Brevity, 
dignity,  and  a  certain  rounded  completeness  were 
the  essential  qualities  of  such  writing;  and  the 


6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

elegiac  couplet  soon  proved  itself  the  inevitable 
medium.  At  an  early  date  collections  of  inscrip- 
tions were  made,  and  the  forger  followed  in  the 
field.  From  publishing  spurious  verses  under  the 
name  of  Simonides  or  another,  it  was  an  easy 
step  to  turn  the  epigram  into  an  avowed  form 
of  literar>'  expression. 

Meanwhile,  this  trick  of  composing  imaginary 
inscriptions  made  its  way  to  the  banquet  hall.  It 
introduced  a  new  kind  of  lure  to  name  some  one  of 
the  illustrious  dead,  and  then  call  on  each  guest  to 
compose  a  suitable  epitaph  ;  for  death  in  those 
days,  as  always,  had  its  poignant  appeal  for  a  re- 
flective Epicureanism.  "Drink,  for  once  dead 
you  never  shall  return,"  is  a  refrain  as  new  as  it  is 
old  ;  and  love  ? — 

When  I  am  gone,  Cleobulus — for  what  avails?  cast 
among  the  fire  of  young  loves,  I  lie  a  brand  in  the  ashes 
— I  pray  thee  make  the  burial-urn  drunk  with  wine  ere 
thou  lay  it  under  earth,  and  write  on  it,  "  Love's  gift  to 
Death." 

From  such  an  example  it  is  easy  to  see  how  the 
epitaph  could  merge  with  the  erotic  elegies  which 
had  been  sung  at  the  table.  The  two  subjects 
flowed  together  naturally  ;  and  even  where  this 
did  not  occur,  the  peculiar  form  of  the  inscription 
imposed  itself  upon  the  elegy.  From  this  contact 
came  the  epigram  as  we  have  it  in  the  Anthology 
— a  brief  poem  in  elegiac  metre,  written  for  the 
most  part  in  the  closet,  but  with  something  of  the 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  7 

point  and  self-suflEiciency  of  the  actual  engraving 
on  stone,  combined  with  the  zest  and  flavour  of  the 
banquet.  It  might  take  the  form  of  an  epitaph  ; 
it  might,  as  the  supposed  accompaniment  of  a 
temple-gift,  sum  up  some  experience  of  life ;  it 
might,  as  the  inscription  of  a  statue,  invite  to  re- 
pose by  the  wayside  ;  again,  freeing  itself  from 
these  restrictions,  it  might  merely  philosophise  on 
the  vanity  of  things  or  play  with,  the  passions. 
It  was  distinctly  a  new  genre^  having  well-defined 
rules  and  suited  to  the  spirit  of  the  disenchanted 
centuries  after  the  political  fall  of  Greece. 

The  beginning  of  the  epigram  as  a  recognised 
literary  kind  has  been  traced  back  to  two  poets, 
the  founders  of  the  Doric,  or  Peloponnesian,  and 
the  Ionian  schools.  Of  the  first  of  these,  Anyte 
of  Tegea,  little  is  known.  She  was,  apparently 
a  contemporary  of  Theocritus  (the  fact  is  impor- 
tant, considering  the  character  of  their  inspira- 
tion), and  about  300  B.C.  published  a  book  of 
epigrams  which  were  much  imitated  in  later  ages. 
Meleager  opens  his  garland  of  poets  with  the 
' '  many  lilies  of  Anyte, ' '  and  to  another  epigram- 
matist she  w^as  the  "female  Homer."  There 
had  existed  for  some  time  in  Arcadia  a  school 
of  bucolic  poetry,  largely,  it  may  be  supposed,  of 
a  popular  sort  ("soli  cantare  periti  Arcades," 
says  Virgil),  in  which  the  rustic  gods,  Pan  and 
Hermes,  and  the  nymphs  played  an  important 
r61e.  So  far  as  is  known,  Anyte  was  the  first  to 
express  this  spirit  of  homely  pastoral  life  in  ele- 


8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

giac  couplets  for  social  usage.  Only  a  handful  of 
her  poems  have  been  preserved,  but  they  are  suf- 
ficient to  show  the  exquisite  transparency  and 
delicate  finish  of  her  work.  Some  of  them  are  on 
the  humblest  themes,  such  as  this  supposed  in- 
scription for  a  shepherd's  crook,  or  pipe,  or  ivy 
cup: 

To  bristly  Pan  and  the  Nymphs  of  the  farm-yard, 
Theodotus,  the  shepherd,  la3's  this  gift  under  the  crag, 
because  they  stayed  him  when  very  weary  under  the 
parching  summer,  holding  out  to  him  honey-sweet  water 
in  their  hands. 

Others  are  mottoes,  actual  or  imaginary,  for 
fountains  and  statues : 

I,  Hermes,  stand  here  by  the  windy  orchard  in  the 
cross-ways  nigh  the  grey  sea-shore,  giving  rest  on  the 
way  to  wearied  men  ;  and  the  fountain  wells  forth  cold 
stainless  water  ; 

or  this,  perhaps  the  most  radiant  of  all  the  pictures 
in  the  Anthology : 

This  is  the  Cyprian's  ground,  since  it  was  her  pleasure 
ever  to  look  from  land  on  the  shining  sea,  that  she  may 
give  fulfilment  of  their  voyage  to  sailors  ;  and  around 
the  deep  trembles,  gazing  on  her  bright  image. 

(Was  ever  the  beauty  of  the  sea-born  Aphrodite 
more  magically  conveyed  ?)  These  three  epigrams 
Dr.  Mackail  gives  in  his  selection.  One  wishes 
he  could  have  made  room  for  Anyte's  prettj'  lines 
on  the  dead  locust  and  cicada,  or  for  one  at  least 


THE   GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  9 

of  her  pathetic  epitaphs  on  young  girls  dying  in 
their  first  loveliness — so  much  might  have  been 
granted  to  the  poetess  for  her  position. 

The  gods  of  the  fields  and  the  sea  in  these  epi- 
grams prevail  over  those  of  the  cup.  For  the 
wanton  muse  of  Wei7t  und  Weib  we  must  turn  to 
the  Ionian  Asclepiades  of  Samos,  whose  singing, 
according  to  Theocritus,  was  as  high  above  his 
own  as  the  locust  surpasses  a  frog  in  sweetness. 
Others  before  him,  we  may  believe,  had  reduced 
the  love-elegy  to  the  brevity  and  turn  of  an  epi- 
gram, but  he  first,  it  appears,  was  conscious  of 
the  full  powers  of  this  banquet  Muse.  His  themes 
were  those  that  are  so  familiar  to  us  in  the  erotic 
poets  of  Rome  who  copied  the  Alexandrine  school. 
There  is  the  lover  at  the  closed  door  of  his  beloved, 
the  paraklausithyron,  which,  in  the  imitation  of 
Tibullus,  contains  one  of  the  most  romantic  lines 
of  Latin  poetry  :  "  En  ego  cum  tenebris  tota  vagor 
anxius  urbe ' '  ;  there  is  the  appeal  to  the  night- 
lamp,  whose  repetition  continues  down  to  the 
elegy  of  Andre  Chenier  : 

Et  toi,  lampe  nocturne,  astre  cher  a  I'amour, 
Sur  le  marbre  posee,  6  toi!  qui,  jusqu'au  jour, 
De  ta  prison  de  verre  eclairais  nos  tendresses, 
C'est  toi  qui  fus  tdmoin  de  ses  douces  promesses. 

The  gist  of  it  all  is  in  two  perfect  quatrains  of 
Asclepiades  himself : 

Sweet  is  snow  in  summer  for  one  athirst  to  drink,  and 
sweet  for  sailors  after  winter  to  see  the  Crown  of  spring  ; 


lO  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

but  most  sweet  when  one  cloak  hides  two  lovers,  and  the 
praise  of  Ivove  is  told  by  both  ; 

and, 

Let  us  drink  an  unmixed  draught  of  wine  ;  dawn  is  an 
handbreath ;  are  we  waiting  to  see  the  bedtime  lamp 
once  again?  Let  us  drink  merrily  ;  after  no  long  time 
yet,  O  luckless  one,  we  shall  sleep  through  the  long 
night.  [The  words  of  Catullus  :  "  Nox  est  perpetua  una 
dormienda."] 

From  these  two  singers  of  Arcadia  and  of 
Samos  and,  of  course,  from  other  contributory- 
sources  proceeded  the  inspiration  of  the  great 
body  of  epigrammatic  literature  which  con- 
tinues well  down  into  the  Byzantine  Empire. 
Some  of  the  writers  were  poets  of  fame,  such 
as  Callimachus  and  Philetas  ;  some  hid  their 
obscurity  under  the  forged  names  of  Plato  or 
another ;  others  were  grammarians,  or  philoso- 
phers, or  men  of  the  world — courtiers,  perhaps, 
who  took  this  method  of  summing  up,  half- 
seriously  and  half-jocosely,  their  lessons  of  dis- 
illusion. Many  came  from  Asia,  and  were  in  no 
true  sense  of  the  word  Greeks  at  all.  In  the  first 
century  before  Christ,  one  of  these  writers,  Mele- 
ager,  who  was  bom  at  Gadara  (Ramoth-Gilead) 
of  Northern  Palestine,  made  a  selected  anthology 
of  this  literature  so  far  as  it  already  existed,  add- 
ing a  number  of  elegiac  quotations  from  the  older 
classical  poets.  Successive  editors  altered  and 
enlarged  the  collection,  until  the  Anthology,  as 
•we  now  have  it  with  its  thousands  of  epigrams, 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  II 

was  formed  in  the  late  Middle  Ages  by  scholars 
of  Constantinople.  The  last  shadowy  name  in- 
cluded is  that  of  Cometas,  called  Chartularius,  or 
Keeper  of  the  Records,  of  the  tenth  century. 
None  of  his  six  epigrams  possesses  literary  value, 
except  the  one  beautiful  pastoral  couplet,  in 
which,  as  Dr.  Mackail  says,  "we  seem  to  hear 
the  very  voice  of  ancient  poetry  bidding  the  world 
a  lingering  and  reluctant  farewell ' '  : 

Dear  Pan,  abide  here,  drawing  the  pipe  over  thy  lips, 
for  thou  wilt  find  ^cho  on  these  sunny  greens. 

Naturally  the  work  of  so  many  men  during  so 
many  centuries  comprises  a  variety  of  styles  and 
ways  of  looking  at  life  ;  j^et  the  final  impression, 
especially  when  so  sympathetic  a  critic  as 
Dr.  Mackail  has  eliminated  the  superfluous,  is 
singularly  uniform.  Beneath  the  ever-changing 
play  of  sentiment  run  two  qualities,  two  ideas,  that 
in  their  combination  give  the  Anthology  a  pecu- 
liar flavour  of  its  own — the  sense  of  transitoriness 
and  a  certain  indescribable  kindliness  or  friend- 
liness of  spirit.  There  was  in  all  these  poets  an 
unusual  age-consciousness ;  the  glory  of  Greece 
was  behind  them,  and  they  wrote  in  a  sort  of 
crepuscle,  awaiting  the  night.  The  past  is  always 
an  insistent  reality  with  men  of  imagination  ;  its 
influence  was  incalculably  strong  in  the  most  fer- 
vid periods  of  Greek  creation  ;  but  in  the  declin- 
ing pagan  world  it  was  present  in  a  way  almost 
incomprehensible  to  us.     To  one  sailing  in  the 


12  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

^gean  Sea  how  many  monuments  of  former 
greatness  spoke  on  every  coast — famous  cities 
reduced  to  villages,  proud  States  fallen  into 
subserviency,  memories  of  stirring  battles.  The 
temples  were  spoiled  of  their  treasures,  yet  enough 
remained  to  show  the  nobility  of  an  art  now  for- 
ever lost ;  the  old  plays  were  still  produced  on  the 
stage,  but  they  served  only  to  mock  the  sterility 
of  the  present.  These  poets  of  the  late  Hellenic 
world  were  still  in  a  way  members  of  the  ancient 
civilisation,  they  spoke  the  same  language  and 
worshipped,  or  named,  the  same  gods  ;  but  what 
a  gulf  of  impassable  experience  lay  between  them 
and  their  ancestors.  It  is  not  strange  that  the 
shadow  of  transitoriness  enveloped  all  their 
thoughts.  That  feeling  indeed  is  universal  to 
mankind  and  is  never  long  absent  from  poetry, 
but  in  the  Anthology  it  has  a  tone  and  pathos  all 
its  own.  Homer  felt  it  when  he  put  those  great 
words  into  the  mouth  of  one  of  his  heroes  :  "  Ah, 
friend,  if  once  escaped  this  battle  we  were  ever- 
more to  be  ageless  and  deathless ' '  ;  but  then 
follows  the  Homeric  conclusion  :  ' '  Now  let  us  go 
forward,  whether  we  shall  give  glory  to  another 
man,  or  he  to  us."  The  feeling  is  latent  in  the 
epigrams  of  Simonides  on  those  who  perished  in 
the  Persian  war,  as  in  the  two  lines  over  the 
Spartan  tomb  at  Thermopylae :  "  O  passer-by, 
tell  the  Lacedaemonians  that  we  lie  here  obeying 
their  orders  " — but  with  it  how  much  else  !  The 
difference  in  the  epigrams  is  all  in  the  moral. 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  13 

The  will  has  been  loosened  and  the  foreboding  of 
brevity  leads  not  to  greater  resolve,  but  to  indul- 
gence ;  and  in  the  same  way,  in  place  of  the  boast 
of  immortality  through  duty  performed — the 
"praise  that  grows  not  old" — comes  petulant 
indifference : 

Straight  is  the  descent  to  Hades,  whether  thou  wert  to 
go  from  Athens  or  takest  thy  journey  from  Meroe  ;  let  it 
not  vex  thee  to  have  died  so  far  away  from  home  ;  from 
all  lands  the  wind  that  blows  to  Hades  is  but  one. 

That  moral,  which  we  have  already  seen  in 
the  verse  of  Asclepiades,  is  sharpened  in  these 
lines  of  Palladas,  most  disillusioned  of  all  the 
epigrammatists  : 

All  human  must  pay  the  debt  [the  Roman  "  morti  debe- 
mur"],  nor  is  there  any  mortal  who  knows  whether  he 
shall  be  alive  to-morrow  ;  learning  this  clearly,  O  man, 
make  thee  merry,  keeping  the  wine-god  close  by  thee  for 
oblivion  of  death,  and  take  thy  pleasure  with  the  Paphiau 
while  thou  drawest  thy  ephemeral  life ;  but  all  else  give 
to  Fortune's  control. 

You  may  say  that  the  conclusion,  too,  is  com- 
mon to  a  large  body  of  poetry  outside  of  the 
Anthology.  So  doubtless  it  is.  You  will  find  it, 
to  go  back  to  the  seventh  century  B.C.,  in  the 
elegies  of  old  Mimnermus ;  it  is  the  philosophy 
of  Horace  and,  through  him,  of  men  of  the  world 
generally.  Yet  if  one  reads  these  poets  and  the 
epigrammatists  side  by  side,  one  catches  a  dif- 
ference of  note  and  emphasis,  a  something  that 
sets  them  in  two  separate  classes.     Perhaps  it  is 


14  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  suspicion  of  weariness  in  the  diction  of  the 
epigrams  that  renders  them  so  distinct  from  Mim- 
nermus,  while  they  lack  that  final  adjustment  of 
language  which  makes  of  Horace's  most  ques- 
tionable Epicureanism  almost  a  lesson  in  austerity. 
Only  one  who  reads  in  the  original  will  quite 
understand  such  a  distinction ;  but  there  are 
other  differences  that  inhere  in  the  substance  of 
the  epigrams.  One  feels  that  to  these  later  mo- 
ralists their  very  scepticism  is  something  old  and 
long-ago  experienced,  and  that  so  it  involuntarily 
passes  into  badinage,  even  when  the  intention 
is  mocking  and  bitter.  It  is  as  if  some  guest 
at  the  banquet  table,  when  the  fancy  flagged, 
forgot  himself  so  far  as  to  speak  solemnly  of 
the  end  of  things,  and  another  were  to  rebuke 
him  lightly  : 

All  life  is  a  stage  and  a  game  :  either  learn  to  play  it, 
laying  by  seriousness,  or  bear  its  pains. 

(Is  it  accident  that  the  very  word  "  seriousness," 
GTtovdy,  is  that  which  is  naturally  applied  to  the 
classic  literature  of  Greece,  while  game,  naiyviov, 
was  the  technical  term  for  these  later  expressions 
of  wit  ?)  And  then  another  after  another  of  the 
guests  takes  up  the  challenge  : 

Often  I  sang  this,  and  even  out  of  the  grave  will  I  cry 
it:  "  Drink,  before  you  put  on  this  raiment  of  dust." 

(How  Strangely  the  words  prelude  the  thought 
of  FitzGerald's  Omar;  and  so  also  the  following :) 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  1 5 

Give  me  the  sweet  cup  wrought  of  the  earth  from 
which  I  was  born,  and  under  which  I  shall  lie  dead. 

(But  the  Persian  did  not  jest  so  amusingly  as 
this  wanton  Greek:) 

Must  I  not  die?  What  matters  it  to  me  whether  I 
depart  to  Hades  gouty  or  fleet  of  foot?  for  many  will 
carry  me  ;  let  me  become  lame,  for  hardly  on  their 
account  need  I  ever  cease  from  revelling. 

Day  by  day  we  are  born  as  night  retires,  no  more  pos- 
sessing aught  of  our  former  life,  estranged  from  our 
course  of  yesterday,  and  beginning  to-day  the  life  that 
remains.  Do  not  then  call  thyself,  old  man,  abundant 
in  years ;  for  thou  hast  no  share  in  what  is  gone. 

(And  the  end  of  this  fitting  sequel  to  the  old 
impressionism  of  Protagoras  ? — ) 

All  is  laughter,  and  all  is  dust,  and  all  is  nothing ;  for 
out  of  unreason  is  all  that  is. 

(And  yet  not  quite  the  end.  Not  laughter,  but 
silence,  awaited  that  world  finally,  as  it  awaited 
the  banqueters : ) 

Thou  talkest  much,  O  man,  and  thou  art  laid  in  earth 
after  a  little  ;  keep  silence,  and  while  thou  yet  livest, 
meditate  on  death. 

For  the  spirit  of  resignation  lies  beneath  all 
this  laughter  and  incentive  to  joy.  One  is  struck 
by  the  repetition  here  and  there  of  the  great  motto 
of  ancient  Greece  :  Think  as  a  mortal ;  and  by  the 
change  in  its  meaning.  The  words  are  no  longer, 
as  they  were  in  Pindar  and  Sophocles,  and  even 


l6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

in  Demosthenes,  a  warning  against  tlie  insolent 
pride,  or  hybris,  that  would  storm  the  heavens, 
but  a  plea  for  ease  :  "  Haste  not,  toil  not ;  as  thou 
canst,  give,  share,  consume;  think  as  a  mortal." 
This  humanity  is  merely  an  aspect  of  that 
accepted  comfort  of  littleness  which  forms  the 
compensation  for  the  too  clear  perception  of  muta- 
bility. One  feels  this  most  strongly  in  the  section 
of  the  Anthology  headed  Religion,  for  the  very 
gods  have  shrunk  in  their  dimensions,  like  the 
desires  and  ambitions  of  their  worshippers. 
"Small  to  see  am  I,  Priapus,  who  inhabit  this 
spit  of  shore, ' '  begins  one  of  the  epigrams,  and 
another,  which  Dr.  Mackail  entitles  Fortuna  Par- 
vulorum,  is  still  more  pathetic  in  its  humility  : 

Even  me  the  little  god  of  small  things  if  thou  call 
upon  in  due  season  thou  shalt  find  ;  but  ask  not  for  great 
things  ;  since  whatsoever  a  god  of  the  commons  can  give 
to  a  labouring  man  of  this  I,  Tycho,  have  control. 

To  me  there  is  something  deeply  touching  in  this 
little  god  of  small  tJmigs,  this  turning  from  Olym- 
pus, so  far  away,  to  one  of  the  di  minoriim  gen- 
tium, and  in  this  ask  not  for  great  things.  And 
when  destiny  has  done  its  worst,  and  the  family 
is  broken  by  calamity,  the  prayer  of  the  survivor 
is  still  for  the  least  consolation  : 

I  wept  the  doom  of  my  Theionoe,  but  borne  up  by 
hopes  of  her  child  I  wailed  in  lighter  grief;  and  now  a 
jealous  fate  has  bereft  me  of  the  child  also  ;  alas,  babe,  I 
am  cozened  of  even  thee,  all  that  was  left  me.      Per- 


THE    GREEK    ANTHOLOGY  1 7 

sephone,  hearken  thus  much  at  a  father's  lamentation  ; 
lay  the  babe  on  the  bosom  of  its  dead  mother. 

No  English  words  can  quite  suggest  the  littleness 
and  tenderness  of  that  phrase  in  the  last  clause, 
thes  brephos. 

This  is  the  oxy  that  runs  all  through  the  An- 
thology ;  but  the  one  thing  passionately  desired 
and  prayed  for,  the  one  seemingly  small  boon, 
was  beyond  the  giving  of  the  great  or  the  little 
gods.  No  wish  is  repeated  so  continually  by 
these  poets  as  the  longing  for  remembrance.  All 
things  are  fleeting  ;  nothing  is  our  own,  not  even 
this  spark  of  life  which  is  owed  to  Death ;  but  Oh, 
grant  that  after  our  going  some  interposition  of 
human  memory  come  between  us  and  utter  oblit- 
eration. That  longing  is  common,  a  common- 
place, if  you  will.  The  heroes  of  the  Iliad  felt  it 
in  the  underworld  ;  and  the  pains  of  the  lost  in 
Dante's  Inferno  are  pointed  by  the  dread  of  being 
forgotten  among  the  living.  But  the  desire  in 
this  fading  pagan  world  is  something  different 
from  these.  The  braving  of  forgetfulness  or  the 
prayer  for  remembrance  lies  naturally  at  the  heart 
of  these  poems,  which  spring  from  the  epitaph  and 
the  inscription.  It  is  not  only  that  the  dead  cry 
to  the  living  to  be  kept  from  oblivion,  but  the 
living  themselves  beg  a  place  in  the  thought  of 
strangers  and  passers-by.  "  Sit  beneath  the  pop- 
lars here,  wayfarer,  when  thou  art  weary,"  runs 
the  writing  on  a  wayside  tomb,  "and  drawing 
nigh   drink  of  our  spring  ;    and  even  far  away 


l8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

remember  fhe  fountain  that  Simus  sets  by  the 
side  of  Gillus  his  dead  child." 

In  the  end  that  comfort  of  little  things  and  this 
craving  to  be  remembered  are  but  signs  of  the 
coming  together  of  the  sense  of  transitoriness  and 
the  spirit  of  kindliness  which  mark  the  character 
of  this  whole  literature.  Kindliness— yes,  if  any 
one  word  can  convey  the  innermost  quality  of 
these  epigrams,  it  is  that.  They  are  kindly  in 
many  subtle  ways.  It  is  not  only  that  friendship 
is  directly  celebrated,  as  in  the  epigram  of  Cal- 
limachus  so  finely  translated  by  William  Cory: 

They  told  me,  Heraclitus,  they  told  me  you  were  dead. 
They  brought  me  bitter  news  to  hear  and  bitter  tears 

to  shed. 
I  wept  as  I  remembered  how  often  you  and  I 
Had  tired  the  sun  with  talking  and  sent  him  down  the 

sky. 

And  now  that  thou  art  lying,  my  dear  old  Carian  guest, 
A  handful  of  grey  ashes,  long,  long  ago  at  rest, 
Still  are  thy  pleasant  voices,  thy  nightingales,  awake  ; 
For  Death,  he   taketh  all  away,  but  them  he  cannot 
take — 

it  is  not  only  this,  but  a  feeling  of  friendliness 
with  the  world  at  large  perv^ades  almost  the  whole 
Anthology.  It  explains  the  "  charm  of  nature  " 
(the  words  actually  occur  in  one  of  the  epigrams) 
felt  by  these  writers  in  the  protected  valleys  and 
wayside  fountains,  as  it  exaggerates  their  disease 
at  the  salt,  estranging  sea.      It  extends  to   the 


THE    GREEK  ANTHOLOGY  1 9 

gods,  who  are  very  near  to  help,  as  a  human 
friend  would  be.  Even  Pan,  for  a  moment,  is 
willing  to  leave  his  mountain  revels  and  come 
as  the  good  phj-sician  : 

This  for  thee,  O  pipe-player,  minstrel,  gracious  god, 
holy  lord  of  the  Naiads  who  pour  their  urns,  Hygiuus 
made  as  a  gift,  whom  thou,  O  protector,  didst  draw  nigh 
and  make  whole  of  his  hard  sickness  ;  for  among  all  my 
children  thou  didst  stand  by  me  visibly,  not  in  a  dream  of 
night,  but  about  the  mid-circle  of  the  day. 

Among  men  the  feeling  of  kinship  is  fostered 
both  by  prosperity'  and  misfortune.  Does  the 
sailor  accomplish  a  safe  voyage?  Forthwith  he 
records  his  thankfulness  at  some  shrine  of  Posei- 
don, with  a  prayer  for  general  mercy  :  "  Holy 
Spirit  of  the  great  Shaker  of  Earth,  be  thou  grac- 
ious to  others  also."  Does  he  perish  by  the  way? 
Some  stranger  or  comrade  buries  him  with  an  in- 
scription which  speaks  at  once  his  desire  of  re- 
membrance and  his  good-will  toward  others : 
"  Well  be  with  you,  O  mariners,  both  at  sea  and 
on  land  ;  but  know  that  you  pass  by  the  grave  of 
a  shipwrecked  man."  Scarcely  any  theme  in  the 
Anthology  is  commoner  than  this  plea  of  the 
shipwrecked  or  exiled  traveller  to  the  passer-by  ; 
it  seems  to  have  been  peculiarly  welcome  to  the 
poet  who  would  enhance  the  comfort  of  the  ban- 
quet by  pictures  of  distant  toil  and  danger,  and 
from  this  use  it  passed  into  the  general  repertory 
of  the  epigrammatists. 


20  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

But  I  will  not  follow  this  note  of  kindliness 
through  all  its  obvious  and  hidden  manifestations. 
There  is  nothing  entirely  like  it,  I  believe,  to  be 
found  anywhere  else,  and  more  than  any  other 
quality  it  lends  to  the  epigrams  a  beautiful  and 
unique  distinction.  Its  gentleness  does  not  belong 
to  the  great  pagan  world,  and  might  remind  one 
rather  of  the  new  spirit  of  Christianity.  So,  when 
one  reads  the  call  to  rest  of  Hermes  to  those 
"whose  knees  are  tired  with  heavy  toil,"  the 
temptation  is  strong  to  compare  it  with  the  words 
of  Jesus,  "  Come  unto  me,  all  ye  that  labour  and 
are  heavy  laden."  But  the  similarity,  it  need  not 
be  said,  is  fallacious.  There  is  no  new-born  faith 
underlying  the  mercy  and  friendliness  of  the  An- 
thology, no  mutual  love  binding  together  the 
children  of  a  heavenly  Father  ;  nor,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  there  any  touch  of  the  mysticism,  such 
as  that  in  the  Riibaiyat,  which  makes  the  whole 
world  kin — and  kind.  The  spirit  is  here  rather 
the  offspring  of  utter  surrender  to  doubt,  the 
brotherhood  of  those  who  have  cut  off  the  long 
hope  and  must  find  their  comfort  together  and  in 
the  way  of  small  things. 

It  shotdd  not,  therefore,  be  supposed  that  the 
final  impression  of  these  epigrams  is  one  of  morose 
despondency.  Rather,  we  rise  from  their  perusal 
chastened  in  mood,  but  strangely  heartened  in 
endurance.  The  book  is  above  all  companionable, 
and  has  an  insinuation  of  appeal  that  no  other 
work  quite  possesses.    Occasionally  the  word  of 


THE    GREEK  ANTHOLOGY  21 

bitterness  escapes,  or  a  phrase  of  less  jocular 
satire ;  but  these  are  quickly  repressed  as  errors 
of  taste  against  the  occasion.  Something  of  this 
is  due  to  the  origin  of  the  epigram,  but  something 
also  to  the  recollection  of  the  proud  civilisation  of 
which  these  men  were  still  the  disinherited  heirs. 
"  Though  thy  life  be  fixed  in  one  seat,"  writes  an 
epigrammatist  of  the  age  of  Augustus,  ' '  and  thou 
sailest  not  the  sea  nor  treadest  the  roads  on  dry 
land,  yet  by  all  means  go  to  Attica  that  thou 
mayest  see  those  great  nights  of  the  worship  of 
Demeter ;  whereby  thou  shalt  possess  thy  soul 
without  care  among  the  living,  and  lighter  when 
thou  must  go  to  the  place  that  awaiteth  all." 
These  poets,  whose  names  for  the  most  part  mean 
so  little  to  us,  had  partaken  in  memory  of  the 
great  nights  of  Hellas,  and,  if  the  vision  did  not 
incite  them  to  strenuous  emulation,  it  at  least 
made  their  soul  lighter  for  the  descending  path — 
dv\x6v  s\aq)pnr£pov.  Even,  at  times,  this 
serenity  in  the  acceptance  of  fortune  can  imitate 
the  nobler  faith  : 

Me  Chelidon,  priestess  of  Zeus,  an  aged  woman  well- 
skilled  to  make  libation  on  the  altars  of  the  immortals, 
happy  in  my  children,  free  from  grief,  the  tomb  holds  ; 
for  with  no  shadow  in  their  eyes  the  gods  saw  my  piety. 


THE  PRAISE  OF  DICKENS 

If  it  ever  seemed  that  the  popularity  of  Dickens 
was  waning,  certainly  there  is  no  such  appear- 
ance to-day.  Publishers  have  been  vying  with 
one  another  in  putting  out  his  works  in  attractive 
form,  and  now  Messrs.  Chapman  &  Hall  have 
begun  to  issue  the  National  Edition  in  forty 
volumes,  including  many  pieces  never  before 
collected,  and  designed  in  every  way  to  be  de- 
finitive. And  all  the  while  about  his  work  there 
is  going  up  a  critical  chorus  of  praise,  mingling 
the  long  growl  of  Swinburne's  bass,  the  flute-like 
melody  of  Mrs.  Meynell,  the  jumping  staccato  of 
Mr.  Chesterton,  with  I  know  not  how  many  lesser 
notes.  This  indeed  is  well,  if  by  chance  it  helps 
us  to  move  more  familiarly  in  the  shadow  world 
that  Dickens  evoked.  But  no  one  can  read  these 
panegyrists  without  observing  a  curious  fact : 
they  all  erect  some  bogus  enemy,  whom  they 
thereupon  proceed  to  knock  over.  Just  who  this 
dark  miscreant  of  criticism  may  be,  does  not  ap- 
pear, for  at  the  present  hour  scarcely  a  dissen- 
tient voice  can  be  heard.  Is  it  possible  they  are 
protesting  against  a  reservation  in  their  own 
minds  ?  And,  again,  one  observes  a  tendency  to 
laud  Dickens  by  a  kind  of  bravado  for  the  very 
qualities  in  which  he  is  weakest.     So,  for  exam- 

22 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  23 

pie,  you  may  read  Mrs.  Meynell,  herself  a  writer 
of  exquisite  English,  in  praise  of  Dickens  as  a 
stylist,  whereas  it  used  to  be  accepted  for  a  truism 
that  Dickens  had  no  style,  as,  indeed,  properly 
speaking,  he  has  not.  This  is  not  to  deny  that 
he  was  a  master  of  the  clinging,  inevitable  epi- 
thet, or  that  he  was  a  maker  of  memorable 
phrases,  or  even  that  his  language  for  many 
purposes  was  abundantly  efficient.  But  style — 
not  the  grand,  or  the  vigorous,  or  the  antithetic, 
or  the  florid,  but  style  in  itself^is  something  dif- 
ferent from  these  qualities;  it  is  rather  that  rare 
gift  of  words,  that  union  of  simplicity  and  fresh- 
ness, which  lends  a  charm  to  writing  quite  in- 
dependent of  the  ideas  or  images  conveyed.  Some 
great  writers  have  never  acquired  it — George 
Eliot  did  not ;  others  of  less  genius  have  had  it 
always  at  command,  as  did  Mrs.  Gaskell ;  while 
to  the  greatest  it  belongs  as  do  all  things  else. 
Certainly,  of  style  in  this  sense,  Dickens  was 
never  the  possessor.  Take  the  opening  words  of 
his  last  work,  when,  if  ever,  he  should  have  been 
master  of  his  craft  :  "  An  ancient  English  Cathe- 
dral Tower  ?  How  can  the  ancient  English  Ca- 
thedral Tower  be  here  !  The  well-known  massive 
grey  square  tower  of  its  old  Cathedral  ?  How 
can  that  be  here  ! "  It  is  not  too  much  to  say 
that  the  practical  writer  who  could  begin  a  book 
thus,  was  radically  deficient  in  the  niceties  of 
language. 

And  the  faults  of  this  passage  point  to  some 


24  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

of  the  factors  that  go  to  the  making  of  style. 
Manifestly,  there  must  be  no  false  emphasis,  no 
straining  for  effect  beyond  the  needs  of  the  time 
and  place,  no  appearance  of  uneasiness,  but  quiet 
assurance  and  self-subordination.  The  law  of 
style  may  be  defined  as  the  rule  of  Apollo  :  Noth- 
ing too  much ;  it  is  the  art  first  of  all  of  dealing 
frankly  with  the  commonplace  and  the  trivial 
without  being  common  or  mean.  And  it  does 
not  end  here.  In  the  more  important  passages, 
where  direct  pathos  or  humour  or  strong  emotion 
of  any  kind  is  expressed,  other  qualities  may  con- 
ceal the  absence  of  style  ;  but  where  elevation  is 
to  be  attained  without  this  immediate  appeal, 
nothing  can  take  the  place  of  the  law  of  fitness 
and  balance.  I  was  struck  while  reading  David 
Copperfteld  with  the  comparison  of  a  scene  in  that 
book  with  a  similar  scene  in  Heyiry  Esmond. 
Both  have  to  do  with  the  coming  of  a  son  to 
the  home  of  a  buried  mother,  who  in  life  had 
suffered  cruel  wrong  and  bereavement,  and  only 
in  the  grave  had  found  peace.  There  is  here  no 
occasion  for  passionate  tears,  but  only  that  pathos 
of  reflection  which  subdues  the  heart  and  sweet- 
ens memory.  To  read  the  closing  sentences  of 
Thackeray  and  Dickens  side  by  side  is  a  practical 
lesson  in  language : 

Might  she  sleep  in  peace — tnight  she  sleep  in  peace ; 
and  we,  too,  when  our  struggles  and  pains  are  over  ! 
But  the  earth  is  the  Lord's  as  the  heaven  is  ;  we  are  alike 
his  creatures  here  and  yonder.      I  took  a  little  flower  off 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  25 

the  hillock  and  kissed  it,  and  went  my  way,  like  the 
bird  that  had  just  lighted  on  the  cross  by  me,  back  into 
the  world  again.  Silent  receptacle  of  death  ;  tranquil 
depth  of  calm,  out  of  reach  of  tempest  and  trouble !  I 
felt  as  one  who  had  been  walking  below  the  sea,  and 
treading  amidst  the  bones  of  shipwrecks. 

So  Esmond  turns  away  from  the  burial  ground  of 
the  convent  at  Brussels.  The  page  in  David 
Copperfield  is  almost  as  well  known  : 

From  the  moment  of  my  knowing  of  the  death  of  my 
mother,  the  idea  of  her  as  she  had  been  of  late  had  van- 
ished from  me.  I  remembered  her,  from  that  instant, 
only  as  the  young  mother  of  my  earliest  impressions, 
who  had  been  used  to  wind  her  bright  curls  round  and 
round  her  finger,  and  to  dance  with  me  at  twilight  in 
the  parlour.  What  Peggotty  had  told  me  now,  was  so  far 
from  bringing  me  back  to  the  later  period,  that  it  rooted 
the  earlier  image  in  my  mind.  It  may  be  curious,  but  it 
is  true.  In  her  death  she  winged  her  way  back  to  her 
calm  untroubled  youth,  and  cancelled  all  the  rest. 

The  passage  from  Thackeray  may  be  common- 
place in  thought  and  a  little  over-sweet  in  senti- 
ment, but  the  language  has  an  unmistakable 
charm  ;  whereas  it  seems  to  me  that  any  one  who 
is  not  conscious  of  something  discordant  in  the 
close  of  Dickens'  paragraph,  in  the  false  cadences 
and  in  the  impropriety  of  the  word  "  cancelled," 
must  be  equally  dull  to  the  truer  and  finer  harmo- 
nies of  language.  And  this  passage  is  thoroughly 
typical  of  Dickens  in  his  moods  of  reflective 
elevation. 

Not  all  the  modern  praise  of  Dickens,  to  be  sure, 


26  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

displays  this  perversity,  and,  whatever  may  be 
said  against  Mr.  Chesterton's  ebullition  of  doubt- 
ful epigrams,  at  least  he  has  avoided  the  error  of 
choosing  the  shortcomings  of  Dickens  for  com- 
mendation.'    Rightly  he  lays  stress  on  the  superb 
irresponsibility  of  Dickens'  world,  and  the  divine 
folly  of  his  characters.     "Dickens's  art,' '  he  says, 
' '  is  like  life,  because,  like  life,  it  is  irresponsible. 
,  .   .  Dickens  was  a  mythologist  rather  than  a 
novelist;.  .  .  thelast  of  the  my  thologists,  and  per- 
haps the  greatest. ' '     And  again  he  stresses  rightly 
the  democratic  nature  of  his  genius  :      "  Dickens 
stands  first  as  a  defiant  monument  of  what  hap- 
pens when  a  great  literary  genius  has  a  literary 
taste  akin  to  that  of  the  community.  .  .  .  His 
power,  then,  lay  in  the  fact  that  he  expressed 
with  an  energy  and  brilliancy  quite  uncommon 
the    things    close    to    the   common   mind."      I 
am  inclined  to  think  that  in  his  analysis  of  this 
genuine,  not  condescending,  democracy,  Mr.  Ches- 
terton has  found  the  real  key  to  most  that  attracts 
and  repels  us  in  the  novels  ;  yet  even  here  he  has 
not  quite  escaped  the  malign  influence  that  lies  in 
wait  for  the  critic  of  Dickens.     Why  must  Mr. 
Chesterton  imply  on  every  page  that  great  art  is 
always,  like  that  of  Dickens,  democratic  ?      It  is, 
on  the  contrary,  a  simple  statement  of  fact  to  say 
that  in  practically  all  the  living  literature  of  the 
past  the  predominant  note  has  been  aristrocratic. 

'  Charles  Dickens  :  a  Critical  Study,  by  G.  K.  Chester- 
ton.    New  York  :  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.,  1906. 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  27 

Who,  to  take  a  single  illustration,  is  not  acquainted 
with  the  outrageous  contempt  of  the  Elizabethan 
playwrights  for  the  multitude  whose  taste  they 
were  in  part  compelled  to  conciliate  ?  Walt  Whit- 
man knew  this  well  enough,  and  divided  litera- 
ture into  two  great  epochs,  the  aristocratic  of  the 
past,  and  the  democratic  which  was  to  spring 
from  his  own  example.  Tolstoy  knows  it,  and 
finds  Shakespeare  merely  tiresome.' 

'  There  lies  before  me  now  a  little  book  called  Tolstoy 
on  Shakespeare  (Fuuk  &  Wagnalls  Co.),  containing  three 
essays  by  Tolstoy,  Ernest  Crosby,  and  Bernard  Shaw,  re- 
spectively. The  first  reports  thus  on  reading  the  greatest 
of  Shakespeare's  plays:  "Not  only  did  I  feel  no  de- 
light, but  I  felt  an  irresistible  repulsion  and  tedium." 
The  second,  extolling  the  democracy  of  Milton,  Shelley, 
and  Burns,  begins  his  destructive  criticism  :  "  But 
Shakespeare  ? — Shakespeare  ?  where  is  there  a  line  in 
Shakespeare  to  entitle  him  to  a  place  in  this  brother- 
hood ?  Is  there  anything  in  his  plays  that  is  in  the  least 
inconsistent  with  all  that  is  reactionary?"  As  for  Mr. 
Shaw,  it  is  well  known  that  his  complaint  against  the 
elder  dramatist  is  chiefly  because  he  was  not  like  Mr. 
Shaw.  But  there  is  also  in  his  hatred  a  touch  of  the 
same  feeling  that  moves  Tolstoy.  One  need  not  be  a 
blind  worshipper  of  Shakespeare  to  resent  such  small 
talk  as  this.  And  is  it  not  time  that  somebody  spoke 
the  truth  about  Tolstoy  ?  I  do  not  mean  the  author  of 
Anna  Karenina,  but  the  critic  who  makes  the  taste  of  an 
illiterate  Russian  peasant  the  criterion  of  art  and  who 
preaches  the  gospel  of  peace  in  the  spirit  of  malignant 
iconoclasm.  Why  should  we  show  respect  for  this  por- 
tentous charlatanry  ?  I  cannot  see  that  the  sacrifices  of 
Tolstoy's  life  absolve  him  from  such  a  charge.     Quite 


28  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

The  currents  of  ruling  opinion  are,  indeed, 
likely  here  to  introduce  confusion  into  any  mind, 
for  the  question  is  not  without  complications. 
Mr.  Chesterton,  with  his  own  pungency  of  epithet, 
designates  the  democratic  element  in  literature  as 
the  ' '  pungent  and  popular  stab, ' '  and  finds  that 
the  universal  test  of  what  may  be  called  popular, 
of  the  people,  is  whether  it  employs  vigorously 
the  extremes  of  the  tragic  and  the  comic.  Bar- 
ring the  loose  use  of  the  word  "tragic,"  the 
definition  is  excellent,  and  undoubtedly  in  the 
judgments  of  the  heart  the  people  is  right. 
From  this  source  of  power  the  maker  of  books 
will  sever  himself  only  to  his  own  great  peril. 
The  demand  for  simple  uncontrolled  emotions,  for 
clear  moral  decisions  meting  out  happiness  to  the 
good  and  misery  to  the  evil,  (which  is  something 
quite  different  from  tragedy,)  the  call  for  im- 
mediacy of  effect  and  the  direct  use  of  the 
material  of  life — all  this  is  the  democratic  soil 
from  which  literature  must  spring.  Without  this 
it  lacks  sap  and  the  comfort  of  sweet  realit5\  We 
feel  the  partial  want  of  such  a  basis  in  the  French 
classical  drama,  splendid  as  the  work  of  that 
courtly  age  otherwise  is. 

Yet  there  is  an  odd  paradox  connected  with 

the  best  thing  in  Mr.  Chesterton's  book  is  the  contrast 
between  reformers  such  as  Gorky,  who  write  of  Creatures 
that  Once  were  Men,  and  Dickens,  across  all  whose 
sketches  of  the  unfortunate  might  be  written  the  title, 
Creatures  that  Still  are  Men, 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  29 

this  emotional  root  of  letters  :  while  it  alone  gives 
life,  it  cannot  keep  alive.  Racine  has  outlived 
and  will  long  outlive  all  the  merely  popular 
dramas  ever  written  ;  one  can  foresee  a  time  when 
Milton  will  be  more  read  than  Bunyan  ;  the  en- 
joyment of  Gray's  poems  already  is  wider  and  less 
artificial  than  the  taste  for  ballads  which  sprang 
warm  from  the  communal  heart.  The  straight- 
forward appeal  to  the  passions,  the  pathos  and 
humour  of  the  moment,  have  a  strange  trick  of 
becoming  obsolete  with  the  passing  of  time  and 
the  change  of  circumstance.  What  threw  the 
Globe  Theatre  into  spasms  of  tears  and  laughter 
is,  I  suspect,  not  always  the  part  of  Shakespeare 
that  moves  us  most  to-day.  The  preservative  of 
letters,  what  indeed  makes  literature,  is  the  addi- 
tion of  all  those  qualities  that,  for  the  sake  of 
comparison,  we  may  call  aristocratic, — the  note 
of  distinction  which  is  concerned  more  with  form 
than  with  substance,  the  reflective  faculty  which 
broods  over  the  problems  of  morality,  the  question- 
ing spirit  which  curbs  spontaneity,  the  zest  of 
discrimination  which  refines  broad  effects  to  the 
nuance,  the  power  of  fancy  which  transforms 
the  emotions  into  ideas.  In  a  word,  the  aristo- 
cratic element  denotes  self-control,  discipline, 
suppression. 

Now  discipline  and  suppression  Dickens  never 
acquired,  whether  in  art  or  character.  No  writer 
of  England  ever  underwent  in  his  life  so  sharp  a 
contrast  of  neglect  and  celebrity,  and  the  efiect  of 


30  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

either  condition  upon  him  is  equally  significant. 
His  father,  it  is  well  known,  furnished  a  model 
for  the  glorious,  but  rather  uncomfortable,  Mr. 
Micawber  ;  his  mother  apparently  was  a  heartless 
woman.  Out  of  the  shifting,  and  sometimes 
shifty,  scenes  of  his  youth,  one  experience  stands 
out — his  apprenticeship  in  a  blacking  factory, 
which  he  was  later  to  describe  as  David  Copper- 
field's  slavery  in  the  bottling  establishment  of 
Murdstone  &  Grinby.  In  a  bit  of  autobiography 
which  he  once  confided  to  his  friend  Forster,  he 
shows  how  painfully  he  remembered  the  waste 
and  degradation  of  that  time  : 

No  words  can  express  the  secret  agony  of  my  soul  as  I 
sank  into  this  companionship  ;  compared  these  every-day 
associates  with  those  of  my  happier  childhood  ;  and  felt 
my  early  hopes  of  growing  up  to  be  a  learned  and  dis- 
tinguished man  crushed  in  my  breast.  The  deep  remem- 
brance of  the  sense  I  had  of  being  utterly  neglected  and 
hopeless  ;  of  the  shame  I  felt  in  my  position  ;  of  the 
misery  it  was  to  my  young  heart  to  believe  that,  day  by 
day,  what  I  had  learned,  and  thought,  and  delighted  in, 
and  raised  my  fancy  and  my  emulation  up  by,  was  pass- 
ing away  from  me,  never  to  be  brought  back  any  more  ; 
cannot  be  written.  .  .  .  From  that  hour  until  this  at 
which  I  write,  no  word  of  that  part  of  my  childhood 
which  I  have  now  gladly  brought  to  a  close  has  passed 
my  lips  to  any  human  being.  I  have  no  idea  how  long 
it  lasted  ;  whether  for  a  year,  or  much  more,  or  less. 
From  that  hour  until  this  my  father  and  my  mother  have 
been  stricken  dumb  upon  it.  I  have  never  heard  the  least 
allusion  to  it,  however  far  off  and  remote,  from  either  of 
them.     I  have  never,  until  I  now  impart  it  to  this  paper, 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  3 1 

in  any  burst  of  confidence  with  any  one,  my  own  wife 
not  excepted,  raised  the  curtain  I  then  dropped,  thank 
God. 

He  learned  much  in  those  dismal  days — the 
foul  spots  of  lyondon,  the  slime  of  the  river,  the 
inside  of  Marshalsea  prison  (where  his  father  was), 
the  pawnshops,  and  decayed  lodging  houses  ;  but 
one  thing  he  did  not  learn — the  chastening  of 
spirit  that  suffering  is  supposed  to  bestow.  He 
came  up  from  that  descent  into  ignominious 
drudgery  in  a  state  of  nervous  exacerbation.  The 
memory  of  it  rankled  in  his  breast,  and  he  never 
forgave  his  mother  for  her  willingness  to  abandon 
him  to  that  base  misery.  In  his  art  he  would  de- 
scribe the  spectacle  of  poverty  with  enormous 
gusto,  but  the  dull,  aching  resignation  at  the  core 
of  it  and  its  discipline  he  left  for  others  to  lay 
bare. 

A  few  years  of  miscellaneous  occupation  fol- 
lowed, as  schoolboy,  lawyer's  clerk,  and  reporter; 
and  then,  in  1834,  at  the  age  of  twenty-two,  he 
began  to  publish  the  Sketches  of  Boz.  Two  years 
later  Pickwick  opened  its  career  in  monthly  num- 
bers, and  soon  raised  the  author  to  an  incredible 
pitch  of  popularity.  Wealth  came  to  him  almost 
at  a  bound,  while  he  was  still  little  more  than  a 
boy,  and  overweening  fame  as  it  came  to  no  other 
man,  even  in  those  days  of  sudden  celebrity.  And 
it  cannot  be  said  that  the  effect  upon  him  was 
wholly  agreeable.  Magnanimous  in  many  ways, 
no  doubt  he  always  remained,  and  lovable  to  a 


32  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

few  people,  even  to  Carlyle,  who  could  write  of 
him  after  his  death  as  ' '  the  good,  the  gentle, 
high-gifted,  ever-friendly,  noble  Dickens — every 
inch  of  him  an  honest  man ' '  ;  but  it  is  true, 
nevertheless,  that  his  vanity  was  brought  by  all 
this  egregious  adulation  to  a  state  of  unwholesome 
irritability.  Applause  could  not  reach  him  quickly 
enough  and  loud  enough,  and  in  the  end  he  was 
almost  ready  to  give  up  authorship  for  the  noisier 
excitement  of  public  recitation.  There  are  many 
accounts  of  his  manner  of  reading,  or,  more  prop- 
erly, acting  ;  it  was  emphatic,  intense  ;  if  any- 
thing, over-dramatic,  like  his  writing.  "  I  had 
to  go  yesterday  to  Dickens's  Reading,"  writes 
Carlyle  ;  he  "  acts  better  than  any  Macready  in 
the  world  ;  a  whole  tragic,  comic,  heroic,  theatre 
visible,  performing  under  one  hat,  and  keeping  us 
laughing — in  a  sorry  way,  some  of  us  thought — 
the  whole  night."  Alas,  how  sorry  a  way  !  It 
is  not  only  the  waste  of  so  splendid  talents  that 
we  regret,  but  there  is  something  distressful  in 
the  very  thought  of  this  great  man  brutalising 
his  face  to  the  likeness  of  Bill  Sykes,  or  mopping 
and  mowing  as  Fagin,  out  of  the  mere  craving 
for  publicity.  To  me,  at  least,  it  is  one  of  the 
many  painful  chapters  in  our  literary  annals. 
And  I  think  he  could  not  have  so  paltered  with 
his  genius  if  his  characters  had  ever  been  other 
than  the  product  of  a  stupendous  dramatic  egotism. 
Neither  suffering  nor  prosperity  brought  him 
the  one   gift   denied  at  his   birth,   intellectual 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  33 

pudor,  and  the  absence  of  that  restraining  faculty- 
passed,  as  how  could  it  help  passing,  into  his 
work.  We  are  permitted  to-day  to  use  the  word 
gentleman  only  at  our  risk,  and  the  saying  has 
gone  abroad  that  it  is  vulgar  to  speak  of  vul- 
garity. Nevertheless  it  is  merely  idle  to  conceal 
the  fact,  as  is  commonly  done  in  recent  criticism, 
that  a  strain  of  vulgarity  runs  through  Dickens. 
It  is  not  that  his  characters  belong  for  the  most 
part  to  low  life,  but  rather  that  they  do  not  all 
move  in  that  sphere.  For  the  grace  and  ease 
that  are  born  of  voluntary  self-discipline  he  had 
no  measure,  and  the  image  of  the  gentleman 
which  springs  from  that  source  he  had  no  power 
of  evoking.  He  was,  with  one  or  two  doubtful 
and  insignificant  exceptions,  equally  unqualified 
to  create  or  to  satirise  such  a  character.  In  all 
his  novels  you  will  meet  with  no  Henry  Esmond 
or  William  Dobbin,  no,  nor  any  Major  Pendennis 
or  Marquis  of  Steyne,  for  these  also  are  the  result 
of  discipline,  however  selfish  its  end  may  have 
been.  Unfortunately  you  will  come  here  and 
there  upon  some  distorted  shadow  of  them  which 
only  betrays  where  the  master's  cunning  failed. 
I  do  not  see  why  we  should  refuse  the  word  vul- 
garity where  it  so  eminently  belongs. 

To  the  same  cause  must  be  attributed  the  ab- 
sence in  Dickens  of  that  kind  of  tragedy  which 
involves  the  losing  contest  of  a  strong  man  with 
destiny  and  his  triumph  through  spiritual  dis- 
cipline.    His  nearest  approach  to  the  tragic  is  in 

3 


34  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  character  of  Bradley  Headstone,  but  even 
here  the  second  element  is  wanting,  and  there 
is  more  of  pain  than  of  liberation  in  the  breaking 
of  that  obstinate  soul.  It  may  be  said  that  this 
is  not  the  proper  field  of  the  novelist,  inasmuch 
as  genuine  tragedy  requires  also  an  instrument  of 
ideal  elevation  which  lies  scarcely  within  the 
reach  of  prose  fiction.  So  far  Dickens  was  saved 
by  his  limitations  from  an  attempt  that  would 
have  been  at  best  but  a  questionable  success.  In 
place  of  tragic  awe,  he  has  given  us  tears.  I  know 
that  much  of  his  pathos  has  grown  stale  with 
time,  as  that  emotion  is  strangely  apt  to  grow  ; 
yet  here  and  there  it  still  touches  us  in  his  stories 
as  freshly  almost  as  when  they  first  came  to  the 
reader  in  monthly  instalments ;  and,  after  all, 
they  are  but  of  yesterday.  Most  of  us  may  find 
Dora,  the  child-wife,  anything  rather  than  pa- 
thetic, but  there  are  few  who  will  withhold  their 
tears  from  the  death  of  Little  Nell.'  Here  is  no 
conflict,  no  bitter  and  triumphant  self-suppression; 
it  is  the  picture  of  perfect  meekness  and  gentle- 
ness fading  flower-like  in  the  breath  of  adversity. 
At  his  best  there  is  a  tenderness  in  the  pathos  of 
Dickens,  a  divine  tenderness,  I  had  almost  said, 
which  no  other  of  our  novelists  has  ever  found. 
Who  has  been  able  to  harden  his  heart  when 
Copperfield,  after  the  shame  of  Emily,  talks  with 

'  Yet  Mr.  Andrew  Lang,  in  his  Letters  to  Dead 
Authors,  vows  he  is  no  more  touched  by  Little  Nell 
than  by  her  lacrimose  sisters. 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  35 

Mr.  Peggotty  and  Ham  on  the  seashore?  and 
when  the  old  man,  being  asked  whether  they  will 
desert  the  stranded  boat  that  has  been  their  home, 
replies  ? — 

Every  night,  as  reg'lar  as  the  night  comes,  the  candle 
must  be  stood  in  its  old  pane  of  glass,  that  if  ever  she 
should  see  it,  it  may  seem  to  say,  "  Come  back,  my  child, 
come  back  !  "  If  ever  there 's  a  knock,  Ham  (partic'ler 
a  soft  knock),  arter  dark,  at  your  aunt's  door,  doen't  you 
go  nigh  it.  Let  it  be  her — not  you — that  sees  my  fallen 
child  ! 

And  again  there  is  the  same  touch  of  human 
delicacy  when,  in  the  presence  of  David,  the 
broken  girl,  discovered  at  last,  sinks  in  her  uncle's 
arms  :  ' '  He  gazed  for  a  few  seconds  in  the  face  ; 
then  stooped  to  kiss  it — oh,  how  tenderly  ! — and 
drew  a  handkerchief  before  it."  The  beauty  of 
the  gesture  is  all  the  finer  because  it  follows  the 
coarsely  conceived  and  coarsely  written  inter- 
view with  the  impossible  Rosa  Dartle.  Nor  was 
Ham,  the  lover  of  the  girl,  without  something  of 
that  great-hearted  tenderness.  His  death,  with 
his  enemy's,  in  the  storm  may  border  on  melo- 
drama, but  it  cannot  blunt  the  memory  of  his  last 
message  to  Emily,  his  parting  with  David  by  the 
boat-house,  and  then — 

With  a  slight  wave  of  his  hand,  as  though  to  explain 
to  me  that  he  could  not  enter  the  old  place,  he  turned 
away.  As  I  looked  after  his  figure,  crossing  the  waste 
in  the  moonlight,  I  saw  him  turn  his  face  towards  a  strip 


36  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

of  silvery  light  upon  the  sea,  and  pass  on,  looking  at  it, 
until  he  was  a  shadow  in  the  distance. 

These  things  came  to  Dickens  at  times,  and  they 
give  him  freedom  of  the  company  of  the  greatest. 
But  if  his  pathos  too  often  failed  from  some 
fault  of  taste,  his  humour  was  incessant  and  sure. 
I  do  not  mean  the  mere  ludicrousness  of  situation 
— the  amiable  Mr.  Pickwick  caught  at  eaves- 
dropping, or  the  dashing  Mr.  Winkle  on  horse- 
back, although  there  is  abundance  of  this,  too,  in 
Dickens  that  has  not  grown  stale— but  the  deeper 
and  more  thoroughly  English  humour  of  char- 
acter. He  is  a  humourist  in  the  manner  of  Ben 
Jonson  and  Smollett  and  Sterne  and  a  long  line 
of  others — the  greatest  of  them,  some  think,  and, 
alas  that  it  should  be  so,  the  last,  for  with  his 
followers,  of  whom  Gissing  is  a  type,  a  new  spirit 
of  sympathy  enters  hostile  to  the  old  spontaneous 
joy.  It  was  not  for  nothing  that  his  favourite 
reading  as  a  child  and  as  a  man  was  the  great  novel 
writers  of  the  eighteenth  century.  From  their 
hands  he  received  the  art  which  his  genius  was 
to  develop  in  a  hundred  ways.  Humours,  as 
Walpole  observed,  are  native  to  England,  being 
the  product  of  a  government  which  allows  the 
individual  to  develop  without  restraint.  Quite  as 
often,  I  should  say,  they  are  in  reality  the  escape 
in  one  direction  of  faculties  otherwise  pent  up 
and  oppressed — the  exaggeration  of  some  whim 
or  eccentricity  until  the  whole  demeanour-  of  a 
man  is  dominated  by  it.     Their  very  essence,  at 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  37 

least  as  they  come  to  us  in  art,  is  the  insolence  of 
irrepressible  life.  Sometimes  Dickens  descends 
into  mere  parrot-like  reiteration  of  a  phrase,  such 
as  "  Barkis  is  willin'  "  or  "I  never  will  desert 
Mr.  Micawber,"  but  more  commonly  he  invents 
a  wonderful  variety  in  sameness. 

In  one  particular,  in  what  may  be  called  the 
humour  of  trade,  Dickens  is  supreme.  Others 
have  seen  the  fruitfulness  of  this  theme.  Indeed, 
as  Hazlitt  remarks,  "the  chief  charm  of  reading 
the  old  novels  is  from  the  picture  they  give  of  the 
egotism  of  the  characters,  the  importance  of  each 
individual  to  himself,  and  his  fancied  superiority 
over  every  one  else.  We  like,  for  instance,  the 
pedantry  of  Parson  Adams,  who  thought  a  school- 
master the  greatest  character  in  the  world,  and 
that  he  was  the  greatest  schoolmaster  in  it."  Or, 
if  we  come  to  Dickens'  owm  day,  there  is  such  a 
pedantic  humourist  as  the  Gypsy,  who  communi- 
cated to  Borrow  the  secrets  of  rat-catching,  and 
"  spoke  in  the  most  enthusiastic  manner  of  his 
trade,  saying  that  it  was  the  best  trade  in  the 
world  and  most  diverting,  and  that  it  was  likely 
to  last  for  ever."  These  characters  are  common 
enough  everj'where,  but  in  Dickens  they  flourish 
with  extraordinary  exuberance.  Who  can  name 
them  all  ? — from  old  Jack  Bamber,  the  lawyer's 
clerk  in  the  Pickwick  Papers,  with  his  doddering 
delight  in  the  mouldering  chambers  and  sordid 
tragedies  of  the  Inns,  to  Durdles,  the  stone-cutter 
in  Edwin  Drood,  with  his  grotesque  complacency 


^8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

"  down  in  the  crypt  among  the  earthy  damps 
there,  and  the  dead  breath  of  the  old  'uns" — 
who  can  count  them  ?  What  horror  or  pain  or 
dull  subjection  can  diminish  their  infinite  zest  in 
living?  It  has  always  seemed  to  me  that  Jasper's 
complaints  about  the  cramped  monotony  of  his 
existence  and  the  need  of  subduing  himself  to  his 
vocation  were  a  species  of  treachery  to  the  genius 
of  his  creator,  a  sign  that  the  author's  peculiar 
power  was  passing  away,  or,  at  least,  suffering  a 
change.  Only  when  we  come  to  Durdles  do  we 
recognise  the  real  Dickens  again,  or  to  Sapsea  en- 
larging gloriously  on  the  education  to  be  derived 
from  auctioneering,  or  to  Tartar  fitting  up  his 
room  like  a  ship's  cabin  so  as  to  have  a  constant 
opportunity  of  knocking  his  head  against  the 
ceiling. 

And  this  special  quality  of  humour,  shown  by 
a  man's  exultation  in  his  trade,  leads  to  a  trait  of 
Dickens  which  might  easily  be  overlooked.  Com- 
monly— always,  I  think,  when  most  characteristic 
— he  describes  his  people  from  the  outside  and 
not  from  within,  Let  us  not  be  deceived  by  that 
"pungent  and  popular  stab"  ;  these  emotions 
that  touch  us  so  quickly  are  not  what  the  charac- 
ters themselves  would  feel,  but  what  Dickens,  the 
great  egotistic  dramatic  observer,  felt  while  look- 
ing out  upon  them.  This  pathos  is  not  the  actual 
grief  of  one  bewildered  and  crushed  by  circum- 
stances ;  it  is  the  yearning  for  tears,  the  yoov 
i'fxEpos  of  the  strong,  impregnable  heart.      Do 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  39 

you  suppose  that  Smike  ever  knew  in  his  own 
breast  the  luxury  of  sorrow  he  gave  to  his  creator 
and  still  gives  to  the  reader  ?  His  misery,  I  fear, 
was  of  a  dumber,  grimier  sort. 

And  so  with  those  characters  that  merge  into 
the  pedantry  of  humour,  to  repeat  Hazlitt's  happy 
phrase.  It  is  the  democracy  of  Dickens  that  called 
them  into  birth,  no  doubt,  but  something  else  en- 
tered into  their  composition  in  the  end — the  great 
joy  of  creation  which  made  it  impossible  for  the 
author  to  abide  within  their  vexed  circle.  Possibly 
old  Weller  got  such  hilarious  glee  out  of  the  mis- 
doings of  his  wife  and  Stiggins  as  his  words  im- 
port, but  what  of  a  thousand  weaker  souls  who 
hug  the  evil  conditions  of  their  lot?  There  is 
the  ragged  stoker  in  The  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  who 
nourishes  a  romantic  comfort  from  his  sympathy 
with  the  cinders  and  the  roaring  furnace  that 
have  been  his  whole  existence.  There  is  "No. 
20,"  who  became  so  inured  to  the  Fleet  that 
within  its  walls  was  freedom  and  all  without  was 
prison.  And  there  is  the  sublime  Quilp,  almost 
the  highest  stroke  of  the  master.  He  is  brother 
to  all  the  spooks  and  goblins  of  the  credulous 
past,  a  pure  creature  of  fairyland.  His  trade  is 
malice,  and  the  sheer  exhilaration  of  evil  never 
received  a  more  perfect  expression.  Wickedness 
in  him,  losing  its  sullen  despair,  is  turned  to  a 
godlike  amusement.  I  cannot  be  persuaded  that 
Mrs.  Quilp  really  suffered  on  that  memorable 
occasion  when  she  sat  up  all  night,  while  her 


40  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

crooked  lord  smoked  and  imbibed  grog;  the 
pleasure  of  watching  his  fantastic  features  must 
have  counteracted  all  sense  of  fatigue.  In  fact, 
we  are  told  that  she  loved  him  to  the  end.  It 
was  unpardonable  in  Dickens  to  bring  him  to 
that  fear  and  death  in  the  slime  of  the  river. 
Here  he  was  misled  by  that  other  democratic 
instinct  which  demands  the  punishment  of  the 
malefactor,  and  if  Dickens  in  creating  Quilp  had 
at  all  entered  into  the  reality  of  evil,  this  grew- 
some  climax  would  have  been  appropriate.  But 
Quilp,  the  gay  magician  of  malice,  who  breathed 
fire  and  whose  drink  was  boiling  rum — to  think 
of  him  perishing  in  the  cold  element  of  water  ! 
A  mere  novice  could  have  contrived  his  taking 
off  better.  There  is  a  description  of  him  in  his 
solitary  lair  that  suggests  his  true  end  : 

Mr.  Quilp  once  more  crossed  the  Thames  and  shut 
himself  up  in  his  Bachelor's  Hall,  which,  by  reason  of 
its  newly  erected  chimney  depositing  the  smoke  inside 
the  room  and  carrying  none  of  it  off,  was  not  quite  so 
agreeable  as  more  fastidious  people  might  have  desired. 
Such  inconveniences,  however,  instead  of  disgusting  the 
dwarf  with  his  new  abode,  rather  suited  his  humour  ;  so, 
after  dining  luxuriously  from  the  public-house,  he  lighted 
his  pipe,  and  smoked  against  the  chimney  until  nothing 
of  him  was  visible  through  the  mist  but  a  pair  of  red  and 
highly  inflamed  eyes,  with  sometimes  a  dim  vision  of  his 
head  and  face,  as,  in  a  violent  fit  of  coughing,  he  slightly 
stirred  the  smoke  and  scattered  the  heavy  wreaths  by 
which  they  were  obscured.  In  the  midst  of  this  atmos- 
phere, which  must  infallibly  have  smothered  any  other 
man,  Mr.  Quilp  passed  the  evening  with  great  cheerful- 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  4I 

ness  ;  solacing  himself  all  the  time  with  the  pipe  and  the 
case-bottle ;  and  occasionally  entertaining  himself  with 
a  melodious  howl,  intended  for  a  song.  ,  .  .  Thus  he 
amused  himself  until  nearly  midnight,  when  he  turned 
into  his  hammock  with  the  utmost  satisfaction. 

That  was  the  time  and  the  scene  for  the  catas- 
trophe. In  a  wild  burst  of  flame  he  and  his 
guilty  haunt  should  have  disappeared  forever, 
while  his  wife  and  accomplices  looked  on  in  terror, 
wondering  if  they  beheld  his  distorted  counten- 
ance still  grimacing  at  them  out  of  the  ascending 
smoke.  But  it  was  notoriously  the  way  of  Dickens 
to  bring  his  people  to  an  impossible  conclusion. 
Quilp  he  could  drown,  while  of  Micawber  he 
made  a  dignified  magistrate  and  of  Traddles  a 
prosperous  lawyer. 

So  it  is  that  the  emotions  in  Dickens'  work 
are  quick  to  life,  whereas  the  people  are  external 
to  us,  if  not  unreal  ;  to  make  the  inevitable  com- 
parison, we  seem  to  have  known  Dickens'  char- 
acters, Thackeray's  we  have  lived.  And  this 
goes  with  the  surprising  diversity  of  judgments 
you  may  read  in  his  admirers.  Take  the  three 
critical  studies  that  lie  before  me  at  the  present 
moment — by  Prof.  A.  W.  Ward,  Mr.  Chesterton, 
and  Gissing — and  you  will  find  them  in  a  state  of 
most  bewildering  disagreement.  To  Mr.  Chester- 
ton the  epitaph  of  Sapsea  on  his  wife  is  a  bit  of 
"beatific  buflFoonerj^"  the  true  essential  Dickens, 
whereas  Gissing  will  none  of  it,  and  thinks  it 
transcends  the  limits  of  art.     Gissing  can  put  no 


42  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

faith  in  Mr.  Peggotty,  whereas  Professor  Ward 
finds  this  whole  episode  of  Emily  and  her  uncle 
the  most  perfect  part  of  the  book.  Only  he  would 
exclude  Rosa  Dartle,  who  to  Mr.  Chesterton  is 
one  of  Dickens'  "real  characters."  Gissing  re- 
joices to  see  Pecksniff  in  the  end  "  felled  to  the 
ground,"  whereas  Mr.  Chesterton  deems  the 
penalty  one  of  the  peculiar  blemishes  in  Dickens' 
denouements.  And  so  on  through  the  list.  Most 
astonishing  of  all,  both  Gissing  and  Professor 
Ward  find  special  beauty  in  that  story  of ' '  Doady ' ' 
and  Dora  which  to  most  readers,  certainly,  is  an 
utterly  tiresome  piece  of  mawkishness. 

Now  there  has  been  no  such  divergence  of 
opinion  among  the  admirers  of  Thackeray  or 
Scott  or  any  other  of  the  great  novelists.  And 
the  reason  for  it  in  the  case  of  Dickens  is  plainly 
this,  that  his  characters  are  so  constructed  that 
they  will  not  bear  analysis.  Probably  most  peo- 
ple would  join  in  calling  Sam  Weller  (unless  that 
honour  is  reserved  for  old  Weller)  the  finest  con- 
ception in  Dickens,  as  his  humour  is  the  least 
subject  to  the  disillusion  of  repetition.  And  yet, 
can  any  one  really  believe,  if  to  his  peril  he  stops 
to  reflect,  that  such  a  union  of  innocence  and 
worldly  knowledge  ever  existed  in  a  single  breast? 
These  conflicting  judgments  mean  simply  that 
the  critical  faculty  has  been  at  its  dissolving 
work,  not  steadily,  but  at  intervals,  destroying 
the  illusion  where  it  touched  and  leaving  other 
parts  untroubled.     For  there  is  a  right  and   a 


THE    PRAISE    OF    DICKENS  43 

wrong  way  to  read,  or  at  least  to  enjoy,  Dickens, 
as  I  have  in  my  own  experience,  if  I  may  be 
allowed  the  egotism,  emphatically  discovered. 
A  number  of  years  ago,  when  I  was  living  in  the 
remote  seclusion  of  Shelburne,  about  the  only 
novels  at  my  command  were  a  complete  set  of 
Dickens  in  the  village  library.  One  day,  being 
hungry  for  emotion,  I  started  on  these  volumes, 
and  read  them  through — read  as  only  a  starved 
man  can  read,  without  pause  and  without  reflec- 
tion, with  the  smallest  intermissions  for  sleep.  It 
was  an  orgy  of  tears  and  laughter,  almost  im- 
moral in  its  excess,  a  joy  never  to  be  forgotten. 
Well,  I  have  been  reading  the  novels  again, 
slowly  now,  and  weighing  their  effect — and  in 
comparison  how  meagre  my  pleasure  is ! 

But  the  old  way  was  the  right  way,  I  think, 
and  he  who  opens  his  Dickens  must  be  ready  to 
surrender  himself  unreservedly  to  the  magician's 
spell.  And  then,  what  a  place  is  this  into  which 
he  is  carried  !  Who,  while  the  charm  is  upon 
him,  for  any  realism  of  art  would  exchange  the 
divine  impertinence  of  a  world  inhabited  by  Mrs. 
Gamp,  and  Richard  Swiveller,  and  the  Marchion- 
ess, and  Mark  Tapley,  and  Toots,  and  Mantilini, 
and  Mrs.  Nickleby,  and  the  fat  boy — but  the  list 
is  as  endless  as  the  master's  hand  was  indefatig- 
able. "The  key  of  the  great  characters  of 
Dickens,"  says  Mr.  Chesterton,  "is  that  they  are 
all  great  fools."  If  one  were  asked  to  sum  up  in 
a  single  phrase  the  effect  of  all  this  mad  variety 


44  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

of  humours,  one  might  call  it  the  actual  evocation 
into  life  of  that  doctrine  of  Folly  which  Erasmus 
taught  in  his  StultitieB  Laus,  some  four  centuries 
ago.  We  see  the  preacher  in  his  pulpit,  expound- 
ing his  lesson  in  examples  that  Holbein  limned 
so  astutely  ;  we  hear  him  contrast  the  feeble  gen- 
eration of  the  calculators  and  the  sane  with  the 
large-hearted  children  of  folly — poets  and  martyrs, 
whimsicals  and  originals,  and  all  those  whom  the 
world  esteems  mad,  but  who  follow  who  knows 
what  divine  deep-seated  guidance :  ' '  Quod  si 
mortales  prorsus  ab  omni  sapientiae  commercio 
temperarent,  ac  perpetuo  mecum  setatem  agerent, 
ne  esset  quidem  ullum  senium,  verum  perpetua 
iuventa  fruerentur  felices. ' '  And  this  should  be 
the  motto  for  all  the  mystcB  who  have  been  sealed 
into  the  fellowship  of  that  secret  knowledge  :  "  Ut 
nihil  est  stultius  prsepostera  sapientia,  ita  per- 
versa prudenti^  nihil  imprudentius."  Nothing, 
indeed,  is  more  foolish  than  the  preposterous 
wisdom,  nothing  more  imprudent  than  the  per- 
verse prudence,  which  would  withdraw  a  man 
from  the  untroubled  fruition  of  all  that  Dickens 
has  so  bountifully  provided. 


GEORGE  GISSING 

When  Gissing  died  at  St.  Jean  de  Luz, 
in  1903,  broken  down  at  the  age  of  forty-six  by 
years  of  toil  and  privation,  he  had  begun  to 
acquire  in  the  world  at  large  something  of  the 
reputation  he  had  long  possessed  among  a  select 
circle.  But  it  is  to  be  feared  that  the  irony  of  his 
later  works,  such  as  the  posthumous  volume  of 
tales  recently  published,'  may  create  a  wrong  im- 
pression of  his  genius  among  these  newly  won 
friends.  For  Gissing,  more  than  most  writers, 
underwent  a  change  with  the  progress  of  time. 
His  work  in  fact  may  be  divided  into  three  fairly 
distinct  periods.  Passing  over  the  immature 
Workers  in  the  Dawn  (1880),  we  may  mark  off 
the  first  group  of  novels  as  beginning  with  The 
Unclassed  (1884),  and  ending  with  Born  in  Exile 
(1892);  between  these  two  are  Isabel  Clarendon^ 

•  The  House  of  Cobwebs  and  Other  Stories.  By  George 
Gissing.  To  which  is  prefixed  The  Work  of  George  Gis- 
sing, an  introductory  study,  by  Thomas  Seccombe.  New 
York:  E.  P.  Button  &  Co.,  1906.  Several  of  the  most 
important  of  Gissiug's  earlier  novels  are  not  to  be  found 
in  New  York,  either  in  bookshop  or  library  ;  and,  indeed, 
he  cannot  be  said  ever  to  have  been  properly  published  at 
all.  By  getting  together  a  complete  and  decently  printed 
edition  of  his  works  some  enterprising  publisher  might 
benefit  himself  and  the  community. 

45 


46  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Demos ^  Thyrza,  A  Lifers  Morning,  The  Nether 
World,  The  Emancipation,  and  New  Grub  Street. 
The  second  group,  starting  with  Denzil  Quarrier 
(1892),  may  be  limited  by  The  Crown  of  Life 
(1899),  although  the  transition  here  to  his  final 
manner  is  more  gradual  than  the  earlier  change. 
This  second  division  embraces  what  are  perhaps 
the  best  known  of  Gissing's  novels — the  Year  of 
Jubilee  and  The  Whirlpool — and  here  again  there 
is  danger  of  misunderstanding.  These  are  books 
of  undeniable  power,  comparable  in  some  ways  to 
Hardy's  Jude^  the  Obscure,  but  pointed  in  the 
wrong  direction,  and  not  truly  characteristic.  One 
feels  a  troubling  and  uncertain  note  in  all  this 
intermediate  work,  done  while  the  author,  having 
passed  beyond  his  first  intense  preoccupation  with 
the  warfare  for  existence,  was  still  far  from  the 
fair  serenity  of  his  close.  The  greater  Gissing  is 
not  to  be  found  here,  but  in  those  tales  which 
embody  his  own  experiences  in  the  cruel  and 
primeval  nether  world  of  I^ondon — tales  which 
together  make  what  might  be  called  the  Epic  of 
Poverty. 

Poverty,  the  gaunt  greedy  struggle  for  bread, 
the  naked  keen  reality  of  hunger  that  goads  the 
world  onward — how  this  grim  power  reigns  in  all 
Gissing's  early  novels,  crushing  the  uninured 
dreamers  and  soiling  the  strong.  It  is  the  guid- 
ing power  of  The  Unclassed.  It  casts  its  spume 
of  disease  and  misery  on  the  path  of  Thyrza, '  that 

'  It  is  a  curious  comment  on  the  manufacture  of  books 


GEORGE    GISSIXG  47 

fragile  Madonna  of  the  slums,  yet  finds  even  here 
its  pathetic  voice  of  song  : 

A  street  organ  began  to  play  in  front  of  a  public-house 
close  by.  Grail  drew  near  ;  there  were  children  forming 
a  dance,  and  he  stood  to  watch  them. 

Do  you  know  that  music  of  the  obscure  ways,  to  which 
children  dance?  Not  if  you  have  only  heard  it  ground 
to  your  ears'  affliction  beneath  your  windows  in  the 
square.  To  hear  it  aright  you  must  stand  in  the  darkness 
of  such  a  by-street  as  this,  and  for  the  moment  be  at  one 
with  those  who  dwell  around,  in  the  blear-eyed  houses, 
in  the  dim  burrows  of  poverty,  in  the  unmapped  haunts 
of  the  semi-human.  Then  you  will  know  the  significance 
of  that  vulgar  clanging  of  melody  ;  a  pathos  of  which 
you  did  not  dream  will  touch  you,  and  therein  the  secret 
of  hidden  London  will  be  half  revealed.  The  life  of  men 
who  toil  without  hope,  yet  with  the  hunger  of  an  un- 
shaped  desire  ;  of  women  in  whom  the  sweetness  of  their 
sex  is  perishing  under  labour  and  misery  ;  the  laugh,  the 
song  of  the  girl  who  strives  to  enjoy  her  year  or  two  of 
youthful  vigour,  knowing  the  darkness  of  the  years  to 
come  ;  the  careless  defiance  of  the  youth  who  feels  his 
blood  and  revolts  against  the  lot  which  would  tame  it  ; 
all  that  is  purely  human  in  these  darkened  multitudes 
speaks  to  you  as  you  listen. 

A  superb  piece  of  imaginative  prose,  indeed,  as 
Mr.  Seccombe  calls  it,  and  significant  of  the 
music  which  Gissiug  himself  wrested  from  the 
pathos  of  the  lyondon  streets.     The  note  rises  in 

that  Thyrza,  which  was  published  in  1887,  has  never 
been  reprinted.  I  had  to  wait  many  months  before  I 
could  pick  up  a  second-hand  copy,  but  my  reward  was 
great.  It  is  a  book  of  rare,  poignant  beauty.  To  the 
beginner  in  Gissing  I  should  recommend  this  novel  first. 


48  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Lifers  Morning  to  tragic  shrillness,  making  of  it 
one  of  the  most  passionate  stories  in  English  of 
love    striving     against     degraded     associations. 
Again,  in  New  Grub  Street,  it  sinks  to  the  forlorn 
plea  of  genius  baffled  by  unremunerative  toil  and 
starved  into  despair.       Those  who  care  to  know 
the  full  measure  of  agony   through  which  the 
writer  himself  struggled,  may  find  it  portrayed 
here  in  the  lives  of  the  two  unrecognized  novel- 
ists.      Only  Gissing  could  tell  how  much  of  his 
own  experience  was  poured  into  those  "  dwellers 
in  the  valley  of  the  shadow    of  books ' '  ;   how 
much  of  his  fierce  aspiration  to  paint  the  world  as 
it  really  exists  was  expressed  by  the  garret-haunt- 
ing, hunger-driven  Biffen  ;  how  often  his  breast, 
like  Reardon's,  swelled  with  envy  of  the  prosper- 
ous, commercialised  man  of  letters.     "  He  knew 
what  poverty  means.      The  chilling  of  brain  and 
heart,  the  unnerving  of  the  hands,  the  slow  gath- 
ering about  one  of  fear  and  shame  and  impotent 
wrath  ;  the  dread  feeling  of  helplessness,  of  the 
world's  base  indifference.     Poverty  !     Poverty  !  " 
I  am  not  sure  that   it  is  good  to  know  these 
things  even  by  hearsay,  but  for  those  who   are 
strong  in  pity  and  fortified  by  resolve  they  have 
been  written  out  once  for  all,  ruthlessly,  without 
mitigation. 

More  general,  gathering  up  all  the  sufiering 
and  foulness  and  crime  of  want,  embracing  too 
the  clear-eyed  charity  of  strength  that  asks  for 
no  reward,  is  that  terrible  story  of  The  Nether 


GEORGE    GISSING  49 

World.  Here,  most  of  all,  Gissing  is  con- 
scious of  his  grave  theme.  We  have  seen  the 
pathetic  joy  of  the  children  dancing  to  the  simple 
music  of  the  street  organ  ;  it  may  be  well  to  com- 
pare with  it  a  fragment  of  the  chapter  lo  Satur- 
nalia !  which  describes  a  holiday  of  revelling  at 
the  Crystal  Palace  : 

It  is  a  great  review  of  the  People  !  On  the  whole 
how  respectable  they  are,  how  sober,  how  deadly  dull! 
See  how  worn-out  the  poor  girls  are  becoming,  how 
they  gape,  what  listless  eyes  most  of  them  have  !  The 
stoop  in  the  shoulders  so  universal  among  them  merely 
means  over-toil  in  the  work-room.  Not  one  in  a  thou- 
sand shows  the  elements  of  taste  in  dress  ;  vulgarity  and 
worse  glares  in  all  but  every  costume.  Observe  the 
middle-aged  women  ;  it  would  be  small  surprise  that 
their  good-looks  had  vanished,  but  whence  comes  it  that 
they  are  animal,  repulsive,  absolutely  vicious  in  ugli- 
ness? Mark  the  men  in  their  turn  ;  four  in  every  six 
have  visages  so  deformed  by  ill-health  that  they  excite 
disgust.  .  .  . 

A  great  review  of  the  People.  Since  man  came  into 
being,    did  the  world  ever  exhibit  a  sadder  spectacle  ? 

On  the  terraces  dancing  has  commenced  ;  the  players 
of  violins,  concertinas,  and  penny  whistles  do  a  brisk 
trade  among  the  groups  eager  for  a  rough-and-tumble 
valse ;  so  do  the  pickpockets.  Vigorous  and  varied 
is  the  jollity  that  occupies  the  external  galleries,  filling 
now  in  expectation  of  the  fireworks ;  indescribable 
the  mingled  tumult  that  roars  heavenward.  Girls 
linked  by  the  half-dozen  arm  in  arm  leap  along  with 
shrieks  like  grotesque  maenads ;  a  rougher  horse-play 
finds  favour  among  the  youths,  occasionally  leading  to 
4 


50  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

fisticuflFs.  Thick  voices  bellow  in  fragmentary  chorus; 
from  every  side  comes  the  yell,  the  cat-call,  the  ear- 
rending  whistle ;  and  as  the  bass,  the  never-ceasing 
accompaniment,  sounds  the  myriad-footed  tramp,  tramp, 
along  the  wooden  flooring.  A  fight,  a  scene  of  bestial 
drunkenness,  a  tender  whispering  between  two  lovers, 
proceed  concurrently  in  a  space  of  five  square  yards. 
Above  them  glimmers   the  dawn  of  star-light. 

It  is  not  strange  that  the  witness  and  recorder  of 
these  things  should  have  interposed  the  ques- 
tion :  Did  the  world  ever  exhibit  a  sadder  spec- 
tacle ?  Only  one  is  surprised  that  to  his  memory, 
steeped  as  it  was  in  classic  history,  the  words  of 
Pericles  did  not  involuntarily  arise  :  ' '  Poverty  is 
no  bar.  .  .  .  And  our  laws  have  provided  for 
the  mind  an  ever-recurring  respite  from  toil  by 
the  appointment  of  public  recreations  and  religious 
ceremonies  throughout  the  year,  performed  with 
peculiar  elegance,  and  by  their  daily  delight 
driving  away  sordid  care."  How  far  we  of  the 
modern  world  have  progressed  from  the  philoso- 
phy of  joy  !  We  are  not  now  at  Athens,  at  the 
graves  of  those  who  died  in  battle  for  their  native 
land,  but  in  the  harsher  warfare  of  industrial 
London.  And  as  a  chorus  above  all  the  sounds 
of  defeat  and  consternation  rises  the  clamorous 
cry  of  "  Mad  Jack,"  like  the  prophesying  of  some 
Jeremiah  of  the  slums  : 

"  Don't  laugh  !  Don't  any  of  you  laugh  ;  for  as  sure 
as  I  live  it  was  an  angel  stood  in  the  room  and  spoke  to 
me.  There  was  a  light  such  as  none  of  you  ever  saw, 
and  the  angel  stood  in  the  midst  of  it.      And  he  said  to 


GEORGE    GISSING  51 

me  :  'Listen,  while  I  reveal  to  you  the  truth,  that  you 
may  know  where  you  are  and  what  you  are  ;  and  this  is 
done  for  a  great  purpose.'  And  I  fell  down  on  my 
knees,  but  never  a  word  could  I  have  spoken.  Then 
the  angel  said  :  '  You  are  passing  through  a  state  of 
punishment.  You,  and  all  the  poor  among  whom  you 
live  ;  all  those  who  are  in  suffering  of  body  and  darkness 
of  mind  were  once  rich  people,  with  every  blessing  the 
world  can  bestow,  with  every  opportunity  of  happiness 
in  yourselves  and  of  making  others  happy.  Because 
you  made  an  ill  use  of  your  wealth,  because  you  were 
selfish  and  hard-hearted  and  oppressive,  and  sinful  in 
every  kind  of  indulgence,  therefore  after  death  you  re- 
ceived the  reward  of  wickedness.  This  life  you  are  now 
leading  is  that  of  the  damned  ;  this  place  to  which  you 
are  confined  is  hell !  There  is  no  escape  for  you.  From 
poor  you  shall  become  poorer  ;  the  older  you  grow  the 
lower  shall  you  sink  in  want  and  misery  ;  at  the  end 
there  is  waiting  for  you,  one  and  all,  a  death  in  aban- 
donment and  despair.  This  is  hell — hell— hell !' "  .  .  . 
Above  the  noise  of  the  crowd  rose  a  shrill,  wild  voice, 
chanting : 

"  All  ye  works  of  the  Lord,  bless  ye  the  Lord  ;  praise 
him  and  magnify  him  forever  !  " 

It  has  seemed  worth  while  to  quote  thus  at 
length,  because  Gissing  is  one  of  the  few  English 
novelists  whose  trained  and  supple  language 
makes  itself  felt  in  such  extracts,  and  because  his 
first  lesson  of  life  is  shown  in  them  so  clearly. 
"Put  money  in  thy  purse,"  might  seem  to  be 
the  upshot  of  it  all ;  "and  again,  put  money  in 
thy  purse ;  for  as  the  world  is  ordered,  to  lack 
current  coin  is  to  lack  the  privileges  of  humanity, 
and  indigence  is  the  death  of  the  soul."      It  is  a 


52  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

dubious  philosophy,  one  which  the  writer's  own 
heroic  culture  rebuked,  and  yet,  what  is  it  more 
than  the  modern  rendering  of  Homer's  dovXiov 

Jove  fix'd  it  certain,  that  what  ever  day 
Makes  man  a  slave,  takes  half  his  worth  away  ? 

But,  waiving  the  point  in  ethics,  there  still  re- 
mains the  question  of  art  :  what  profit  is  it,  one 
asks,  to  paint  in  all  its  hideous  colours  this  death 
of  the  soul,  to  forget  the  glad  things  of  the  world 
for  its  shadows,  to  deny  Agamemnon  and  Achilles 
and  choose  Thersites  for  the  hero  of  our  tale  ? 
"Art,  nowadays,"  Gissing  replies  boldly,  "must 
be  the  mouthpiece  of  misery,  for  misery  is  the 
key-note  of  modern  life."  It  is  not  entirely  easy 
to  reconcile  such  a  theory  with  the  judgment  of 
Gissing' s  own  riper  years ;  for  art,  he  came  in 
the  end  to  think,  is  "an  expression,  satisfying 
and  abiding,  of  the  zest  of  life. ' '  Certainly,  it  is 
this  contrast  between  the  misery  and  the  zest  of 
life,  derived  from  the  same  materials,  that  makes 
the  comparison  between  Dickens  and  Gissing  so 
inevitable.  Gissing  felt  it,  and  his  Critical  Study 
of  Dickens  is,  as  a  result,  a  curiously  ambig- 
uous piece  of  writing ;  his  intention  is  to 
praise,  but  he  can  never  quite  overcome  his  sur- 
prise and  annoyance  at  the  radical  difference  of 
Dickens'  attitude  toward  poverty.  And  the  same 
feeling  crops  out  again  and  again  in  the  earlier 
novels.      Inextinguishable  laughter  were  fittest, 


GEORGE    GISSING  $3 

he  says,  musing  on  his  own  terrible  nether  world 
and  thinking  of  the  elder  writer's  gaiety,  but  the 
heart  grows  heavy.     And  elsewhere  he  blames 
the  shallowness  of  Dickens,  and  calls  on  fiction 
to   "  dig  deeper "    into  the   substratum   of    life. 
The  question  thus  posed  exhibits  one  of  the  irre- 
ducible differences  of  artistic  method.     In  my  last 
essay  I  tried  to  show  how  Dickens  tended  to  por- 
tray his  characters    from  the  outside,   without 
identifying    himself    with   their   real   emotions. 
Here,  on  the  contrary,  we  have  a  man  whose  am- 
bition it  was  to  strip  off  to  the  last  rag  those  veils 
of  melodrama  and  humour,  which  prevented  Dick- 
ens from  becoming  a  realist,  and  which,  it  may  be 
added,he  himself  by  native  right  possessed  in  large 
measure.     He  would  not  be  waylaid  and  turned 
from  his  purpose  by  the  picturesque  grimaces  of 
poverty,  but  would  lay  bare  the  sullen  ughness 
at  its  core  ;  he  would,  in  a  word,  write  from  the 
inside.     The  result  of  this  difference  of  methods 
is  too  obvious  to  need  attention  here,  but  one 
rather  curious  detail  I  may  point  out.      It  has 
been   observed  that  the  people  of  Dickens  in- 
dulge in  a  superhuman  amount  of  drinking;  wine 
and  gin  are  elements  of  Gargantuan  exhilaration. 
In  Gissing's  world,   drunkenness  is  only  a  blind 
desire  of  escape  from  pain  ;  and  liquor,  the  rich 
man's  friend,  is  the  enemy  always  lying  in  wait 
to  drag  the  needy  to  destruction. 

Only  by  taking  account  of  the  sordid  realities 
of  Gissing's  life  can  we  understand  the  mingled 


54  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

attraction  and  repulsion  exercised  on  him  by  the 
large  joyousness  and  exulting  pathos  of  Dickens 
in  dealing  with  the  nether  world.  Nothing,  to 
be  sure,  in  his  career,  was  more  depressing  than 
the  slavery  of  Dickens  under  "  Murdstone  and 
Grinby,"  but  whereas  Dickens  rose  almost  at  a 
bound  to  enormous  prosperity,  the  life  of  Gissing 
was  one  of  the  tragedies  of  literature.  Hints  of 
that  story  are  scattered  through  all  his  novels, — 
a  youth  cast  from  the  country  into  the  streets  of 
London  to  earn  a  living  as  best  he  could,  a  period 
of  storm  and  stress  including  a  frantic  attempt  on 
fortune  in  the  United  States,  years  of  starving  at 
literary  work,  followed  by  years  of  broken  health. 
He  came  out  at  the  last  into  the  light,  but  almost 
his  friends  might  have  pointed  to  him,  as  the 
people  of  Verona  pointed  to  Dante,  saying  : 
"There  goes  one  who  has  been  in  hell."  Natu- 
rally a  tone  of  bitterness,  something  of  his  own 
lack  of  vitality,  if  you  will,  crept  into  his  work. 
He  always  wavered  between  the  pathetic  fallacy 
on  the  one  hand  of  ascribing  to  the  poor  the  dis- 
tress of  his  own  over-wrought  sensitiveness  and 
on  the  other  hand  hatred  of  a  Destiny  that 
inures  its  victims  to  their  lot.  "The  man  who 
laughs,"  he  said,  reproachfully,  "takes  the  side 
of  a  cruel  omnipotence."  The  words  are  sugges- 
tive. Not  "cruel,  "  but  unimplicated,  let  us  say, 
and  accept  the  phrase  as  a  mark  of  the  greater 
art.  It  is  because  Dickens  stands  with  the  pow- 
ers  above   and  is   not  finally  implicated   in   his 


GEORGE    GISSING  55 

theme,  tliat  he  could  turn  it  into  an  expression, 
satisfying  and  abiding,  of  the  zest  of  life.  And  it 
is,  on  the  other  hand,  just  because  Gissing  cannot 
entirely  rise  above  the  "  misery  "  he  describes, 
that  all  his  marvellous  understanding  of  the 
human  heart  and  his  chastened  style  do  not  quite 
save  his  art  in  the  end. 

And  yet,  if  his  theory  and  practice  must  from 
the  highest  standard  be  condemned,  it  would  be 
unfair  to  overlook  the  reservations  that  should  go 
with  even  so  strict  a  judgment.  For  though  the 
zest  of  life  be  lacking  in  these  novels,  there  is 
something  in  them  that  strangely  resembles  it. 
"  How  "  he  exclaims  in  one  of  his  latest  works — 
"how,  in  the  name  of  sense  and  mercy,  is  man- 
kind content  to  live  on  in  such  a  world  as  this  ? ' ' 
The  question  obtrudes  itself  upon  the  reader  again 
and  again,  and  slowly  he  becomes  aware  of  the 
vast,  dumb,  tumultuous  will  to  live  that  is  strug- 
gling into  consciousness  through  all  these  horrors 
and  madnesses.  The  very  magnitude  of  the  ob- 
stacles, the  tmreason  of  endurance,  is  witness  to 
the  unconquerable  energy  of  this  blind  will. 
What,  after  all,  has  been  the  substance  of  great 
literature,  from  the  days  when  Sarpedon  heart- 
ened Glaucus  on  the  plains  of  Troy  to  the  most 
modern  singer  of  some  soul  divided  against  itself, 
but  warfare,  and  again  renewed  war  ?  And  as 
one  reads  on  in  these  novels  of  Gissing' s,  their 
plot  begins  to  unfold  itself  as  another  and  darker 
picture  of  the  same  battle.     It  is  almost  as  if  we 


56  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

were  listening  to  the  confused  lamentation  of  a 
city  besieged  and  captured  by  night,  wherein 
the  enemy  is  no  invading  army  of  Greece,  but 
the  more  treacherous  powers  of  hunger,  and  vice, 
and  poverty  : 

Diverse  interea  miscentur  moenia  luctu. 

And  there  is  another  element  which  helps  to 
relieve  the  depressing  nature  of  Gissing's  theme. 
I^iterature  of  the  slums  is  not  lacking  in  these 
latter  days.  Young  men  and  women  whose 
standards  of  life  have  been  unsettled  turn  thither- 
ward for  some  basis  of  reality  and  some  reflected 
seriousness  of  emotion.  In  each  of  our  large  cities 
you  will  find  a  college  settlement  where  a  band 
of  prurient  souls  sit  at  type-writing  machines 
glutting  a  morbid  ambition  on  the  sorrows  of  the 
poor.  Now,  Gissing  did  not  learn  the  meaning 
of  poverty  in  any  such  fashion  ;  there  is,  at  all 
events,  nothing  of  the  dilettante  in  his  work.  He 
wrote,  not  frcm  callow  sympathy  or  patronising 
observation,  but  from  his  own  deep  experience  ; 
and,  writing  thus,  he  put  into  his  account  of  the 
nether  world  the  one  thing  commonly  wanting  to 
these  pictures — the  profound  sense  of  morality. 
Through  all  these  graphic,  sometimes  appalling, 
scenes  one  knows  that  the  writer  is  still  primarily 
concerned  with  the  inner  effects  of  poverty,  and 
his  problem  is  the  ancient,  insoluble  antinomy  of 
the  one  and  the  many,  the  individual  and  the 
mass.    Taken  as  a  whole,  the  society  he  describes 


GEORGE    GISSING  57 

is  the  victim  of  circumstances.  His  philosophy- 
is  summed  up  in  a  gloomy  determinism  :  "in- 
digence is  the  death  of  the  soul,"  and  "  misery  is 
vice."  And  even  where  the  instincts  remain  un- 
soiled,  some  hideous  chance  steps  in  to  stunt  the 
soul's  growth  : 

It  strengthened  his  growing  hatred  of  London,  a  huge 
battlefield  calling  itself  the  home  of  civilisation  and  of 
peace.  Battlefield  on  which  the  wounds  were  of  soul,  no 
less  than  of  body.  In  these  gaunt  streets  along  which 
he  passed  at  night,  how  many  a  sad  heart  suffered,  by  the 
dim  glimmer  that  showed  at  upper  windows,  a  hopeless 
solitude  amid  the  innumerable  throng!  Human  cattle, 
the  herd  that  feed  and  breed,  -with  them  it  was  well  ;  but 
the  few  born  to  a  desire  forever  unattainable,  the  gentle 
spirits  who  from  their  prisoning  circumstance  looked  up 
and  afar,  how  the  heart  ached  to  think  of  them!  Some 
girl,  of  delicate  instinct,  of  purpose  sweet  and  pure, 
wasting  her  unloved  life  in  toil  and  want  and  indignity  ; 
some  man,  whose  youth  and  courage  strove  against  a 
mean  environment,  whose  eyes  grew  haggard  in  the  vain 
search  for  a  companion  promised  in  his  dreams  ;  they 
lived,  these  two,  parted  perchance  only  by  the  wall  of 
neighbour  houses,  yet  all  huge  London  was  between 
them,  and  their  hands  would  never  touch. 

That  is  the  philosophy  of  circumstance  that 
rules  over  Gissing's  world  as  a  whole.  But  even 
here,  as  in  that  chorus  of  ' '  Mad  Jack  ' '  already- 
quoted,  the  contradictor)^  and  less  comprehensible 
law  of  morality  makes  itself  heard  at  times  ;  and 
when  he  touches  the  individual  the  sure  insight 
of  the  artist  asserts  itself,  and  he  orders  his  people 
not  as  automatons,  but  as  characters  moved  by 


58  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

their  own  volition,  and,  though  it  may  be  in  un- 
accountable ways,  reaping  as  they  have  sown. 
The  knot  of  fate  and  free-will  is  not  always  disen- 
tangled, there  is  no  conventional  apportioning  of 
rewards  and  penalties  such  as  Dickens  indulged 
in  at  the  end  of  his  novels  ;  but  always,  through 
all  the  workings  of  heredity  and  environment,  he 
leaves  the  reader  conscious  of  that  last  inviolable 
mystery  of  man's  nature,  the  sense  of  personal 
responsibility.  Had  not  he,  George  Gissing,  been 
caught  in  the  cruel  network  of  circumstances,  and 
had  he  not  preserved  intact  the  feeling  that  he 
was  personally  accountable  ?  It  is  thus  he  attains 
by  another  road  to  something  of  the  liberal  en- 
largement of  Dickens :  the  greatest  art,  it  need 
scarcely  be  said,  would  combine  both  the  free 
outlook  of  the  older  writer  and  the  moral  insight 
of  the  younger. 

Those  are  the  principles — the  instinctive  will  to 
live  and  the  law  of  moral  responsibility— that 
saved  the  writer's  tragic  stage  from  insupportable 
dreariness  ;  they  furnished,  also,  the  clue  that  in 
the  end  led  the  writer  himself  out  of  the  labyrinth 
of  doubtful  questionings.  But  for  a  while  it 
seemed  as  if  they  were  to  be  lost,  for  it  is  not  so 
much  any  lowering  of  literary  skill  as  a  change  in 
these  essential  points  that  marks  the  transition 
from  his  first  to  his  second  period.  Just  what 
caused  the  alteration  I  cannot  say.  Possibly  the 
long  years  of  defeat  began  to  shake  his  moral 
equilibrium  ;  possibly  the  growing  influence  upon 


GEORGE    GISSING  59 

him  of  French  and  Russian  fiction  was  to  blame. 
Certainly  the  pride  of  English,  what  raises  it, 
despite  its  deficiencies  of  form  and  ideas,  to  be 
the  first  of  modern  literatures,  is  the  deep-rooted 
convention  of  moral  responsibility.  It  is  that 
which  through  all  its  romantic  divagations  joins 
English  so  closely  to  Greek  ;  which  would  have 
made  Socrates  more  at  home  with  Dr.  Johnson 
than  with  any  other  man  of  our  world,  and  would 
have  rendered  -^schylus  the  most  appreciative 
listener  of  Shakespeare — if  such  associations  are 
not  too  fanciful.  No  one  can  sprinkle  himself  with 
the  scented  water  of  Anatole  France  or  dabble 
in  the  turbid  Slavic  pool  without  hazarding  the 
loss  of  that  traditional  sense,  and  there  are  signs 
that  Gissing's  miud  for  a  time  was  bewildered  by 
ill-digested  reading. 

The  new  spirit  may  be  defined  by  a  comparison 
of  such  novels  as  The  Nether  World  from  his  first 
period  and  The  Whirlpool  from  his  second  (the 
very  names  are  significant),  or  as  Life's  Morning 
and  The  Crown  of  Life.  In  place  of  human  na- 
ture battling  with  grim  necessity,  we  now  have  a 
society  of  people  contending  against  endless  in- 
sinuations of  tedium  and  vanity  ;  in  place  of  the 
will  to  live  we  meet  a  sex-consciousness,  always 
strong  in  Gissing,  but  now  grown  to  morbid  in- 
tensity. And  with  this  change  comes  a  certain 
relaxing  of  moral  fibre.  The  unconscious  theme 
is  no  longer  self- responsibility,  or  character  in  the 
strict  meaning  of  the  term,  but  a  thousand  vexa- 


6o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

tious  questions  of  the  day — anti-vivisection,  anti- 
racing,    anti-gambling,    anti-hunting,    anti-war, 
imperialism,  the  education  of  children,  the  eman- 
cipation of  women,  and,  above  all  and  more  per- 
sistent   than   all,    the    thrice-dreary   theories  of 
marriage.    The  beginning  of  these  may  be  traced 
back  to  The  Ema7icipatcd  (i^go),  written  after  he 
had  been  enabled  by  momentary  success  to  visit 
Italy,  the  dream  of  his  life.     In  that  release  from 
pressure  his  mind  seems  to  have  been  left  free  to 
dwell  on  these  problems  resulting  from  the  break- 
up of  traditional  obligations.    But  the  core  of  the 
book  is  sound.   "  An  educated  woman,  this,"  says 
Mallard,  drawing  the  lesson  of  the  heroine's  life  ; 
"one  who  has  learnt  a  good  deal  about  herself 
and  the  world.    She  is  '  emancipated,'  in  the  true 
sense  of  the  hackneyed  word  ;  that  is  to  say,  she 
is  not  only  freed  from  those  bonds  that  numb  the 
faculties  of  mind  and  heart,  but  is  able  to  control 
the  native  passions  that  would  make  a  slave  of 
her."     And,  indeed,  it  would  be  wrong  to  infer 
that  the  moral  of  his  books  is  ever  at  bottom  any 
other  than  this.     In  the  full  swing  of  his  middle 
period  he  could  close  a  novel  with  the  ejaculation 
of  his  hero :  ' '  Now  I  understand  the  necessity 
for  social  law  !  "     But  one  is  aware,  nevertheless, 
that  conventions  have  grown  irksome  to  him,  and 
that  his  interest  turns  too  much  on  the  thronging, 
ambiguous  problems  of  emancipation. 

If  the  reading  of  modern  Continental  literature 
may  be  suspected   of   unsettling   his   inherited 


GEORGE    GISSING  6l 

canons,  his  home-coming  in  the  end  was  surely 
due  in  large  measure  to  his  devoted  study  of  the 
classics.  Strange  as  it  may  seem  when  one  con- 
siders the  topics  he  treated,  there  is  scarcely  a 
writer  of  the  last  century  more  thoroughly  versed 
in  Greek  and  Latin  than  Gissing,  and  that  no 
doubt  is  the  reason  why  the  names  of  antiquity 
come  to  mind  involuntarily  when  one  tries  to 
characterise  his  work.  Through  his  struggle  with 
poverty  he  commonly  kept  free  of  the  pawnshop 
a  few  chosen  books,  Homer,  Tibullus,  Horace, 
Gibbon,  Shakespeare.  Writing  the  memoirs  of  his 
life,  at  ease,  and  with  a  library  at  his  command, 
he  recalls  his  difficulties  : 

I  see  that  alley  hidden  on  the  west  side  of  Tottenham 
Court  Road,  where,  after  living  in  a  back  bedroom  on  the 
top  floor,  I  had  to  exchange  for  the  front  cellar  ;  there 
was  a  diflFerence,  if  I  remember  rightly,  of  sixpence  a 
week,  and  sixpence,  in  those  days,  was  a  very  great  con- 
sideration— why,  it  meant  a  couple  of  meals.  (I  once 
found  sixpence  in  the  street,  and  had  an  exultation  which 
is  vivid  in  me  at  this  moment.)  The  front  cellar  was 
stone-floored  ;  its  furniture  was  a  table,  a  chair,  a  wash- 
stand,  and  a  bed  ;  the  window,  which  of  course  had  never 
been  cleaned  since  it  was  put  in,  received  light  through 
a  flat  grating  in  the  alley  above.  Here  I  lived  ;  here  / 
wrote.  Yes,  "  literary  work  "  was  done  at  that  filthy  deal 
table,  on  which,  by  the  bye,  lay  my  Homer,  my  Shake- 
speare, and  the  few  other  books  I  then  possessed.  At 
night,  as  I  laj'  in  bed,  I  used  to  hear  the  tramp,  tramp  of 
a.  posse  of  policemen  who  passed  along  the  alley  on  their 
way  to  relieve  guard  ;  their  heavy  feet  sometimes  sounded 
on  the  grating  above  my  window. 


62  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

What  a  picture  of  the  new  Grub  Street.  One 
thinks  of  the  deal  table  in  Thoreau's  hut  at 
Walden  on  which  a  Homer  lay,  and  one  thinks, 
too,  of  Dickens  in  his  comfortable  study  with  his 
shelves  of  sham  books.  For  most  of  his  reading 
Gissing  had  to  depend  on  public  convenience  : 

How  many  days  have  I  spent  at  the  British  Museum, 
reading  as  disinterestedly  as  if  I  had  been  without  a  care! 
It  astounds  me  to  remember  that,  having  breakfasted  on 
dry  bread,  and  carrying  in  my  pocket  another  piece  of 
bread  to  serve  for  dinner,  I  settled  myself  at  a  desk  in  the 
great  Reading-Room  with  books  before  me  which  by  no 
possibility  could  be  a  source  of  immediate  profit .  At  such 
a  time,  I  worked  through  German  tomes  on  Ancient 
Philosophy.  At  such  a  time,  I  read  Appuleius  and 
Lucian,  Petronius  and  the  Greek  Anthology,  Diogenes 
Laertius  and — heaven  knows  what!  My  hunger  was  for- 
gotten ;  the  garret  to  which  I  must  return  to  pass  the 
night  never  perturbed  my  thoughts. 

And  Homer  and  Ancient  Philosophy  won  the 
day.  There  was  little  occasion  in  the  earlier 
novels  to  display  this  learning,  yet  here  and  there 
the  author's  longing  for  Rome  and  Italy  breaks 
through,  as  in  the  passion  of  the  apothecary's  ap- 
prentice in  The  Unclassed.  Then  came  the  intel- 
lectual whirlpool.  The  release  from  that  dizziness 
of  brain  shows  itself  first  in  a  growing  lightness  of 
touch  and  aloofness  from  passion  of  all  sorts.  The 
novels  and  tales  of  the  third  period  are  chiefly  dis- 
tinguished by  a  tone  of  gentle  and  amused  irony, 
in  place  of  the  satire  of  the  middle  group,  and  it 
is  significant  that  the  theme  of  Will  Warburton, 


GEORGE    GISSING  63 

his  last  novel,  is  the  same  as  that  chosen  by  Biffen 
in  the  New  Grzib  Street  for  the  pronunciamento  of 
rebellious  realism — the  life  of  a  retail  grocer.  Only 
in  the  actual  novel  there  is  no  realism  at  all  as 
Biffen  would  have  understood  it,  but  the  witty  and 
mock-heroic  story  of  a  man  of  good  birth  who 
begins  by  selling  groceries  over  the  counter  under 
an  assumed  name  and  ends  by  accepting  his  lot 
in  all  gaieti  de  cceur — so  far  had  Gissing  travelled 
from  being  at  loggerheads  with  destiny.  Warbur- 
ton  was  written  in  Southern  France  when  a  mode- 
rate success  had  freed  him  from  the  hardest 
slavery  of  the  pen,  and  when  ill  health  had  driven 
him  from  England.  Here,  too,  he  absolved  him- 
self from  an  ancient  vow  by  composing,  with  all 
the  artistry  he  possessed,  a  story  of  classical  life — 
his  Veranilda — and  here  he  wrote  that  restrained 
and  every  way  beautiful  piece  of  self- revelation, 
The  Private  Papers  of  He^iry  Ryccroft. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  language  quite  like  this 
volume  of  half- veiled  autobiography.  In  the  im- 
agined quiet  of  a  home  in  Devon,  the  part  of 
England  Gissing  so  passionately  loved,  he  writes 
out  his  memories  of  toil  and  the  reflections  that 
come  to  him  as  the  sum  of  his  experiences.  Here 
is  no  bitterness,  no  complaining;  all  the  lesser 
problems  that  harassed  him  have  solved  them- 
selves by  simple  vanishing ;  he  returns  to  his 
early  convictions,  with  the  added  ripeness  of  long 
meditation.  He  had  used  the  life  of  the  poor  for 
his  greatest  creative  work,  and  the  question  of  the 


64  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

growing  democracy  is  the  only  one  that  still  abides 
with  him  in  his  repose.  Ever>'where  he  sees  the 
decay  of  that  natural  instinct  on  which  the  mor- 
ality of  the  world  at  large  must  always  depend, 
and  in  its  place  an  ever- widening  spirit  of  interro- 
gation which  only  unsettles  and  sets  adrift.  * '  I 
am  no  friend  of  the  people,"  he  exclaims,  and  the 
words  come  with  a  strange  insistence  from  such  a 
man.  "As  a  force,  by  which  the  tenor  of  the  time 
is  conditioned,  they  inspire  me  with  distrust,  with 
fear.  .  .  .  Every  instinct  of  my  being  is  anti-demo- 
cratic, and  I  dread  to  think  of  what  our  England 
may  become  when  Demos  rules  irresistibly.  .  .  . 
Nothing  is  more  rooted  in  my  mind  than  the  vast 
distinction  between  the  individual  and  the  class." 
This  doubt  alone  remained  to  annoy  him,  but  with 
it  he  connected  the  other  great  movement  of  the 
day:  "I  hate  and  fear  'science'  because  of  my 
conviction  that,  for  long  to  come,  if  not  for  ever, 
it  will  be  the  remorseless  enemy  of  mankind. ' '  To 
science  he  attributed  the  spread  of  that  half-educa- 
tion which  increases  the  powers  of  action  while 
lessening  the  inhibitions  of  self-knowledge.  It 
was  from  his  close  reading  of  the  classics,  I  think, 
though  he  himself  does  not  say  so,  came  his  notion 
of  the  one  only  salvation  through  the  aristocratic 
idea,  the  essential  idea  of  Greek  literature  : 

The  task  before  us  is  no  ligbt  one.  Can  we,  whilst 
losing  the  class,  retain  the  idea  it  embodied  ?  Can  we 
English,  ever  so  subject  to  the  material,  liberate  our- 
selves from  that  old  association,  yet  guard  its  meaning  in 


GEORGE    GISSING  65 

the  sphere  of  spiritual  life  ?  Can  we,  with  eyes  which 
have  ceased  to  look  reverentlj'  on  worn-out  symbols,  learn 
to  select  from  among  the  grey-coated  multitude,  and  place 
in  reverence  even  higher,  him  who  "  holds  his  patent  of 
nobility  straight  from  Almighty  God  "  ?  Upon  that  de- 
pends the  future  of  England. 

The  business  of  the  novelist  is  with  the  reahties 
of  life,  and  not  with  h5^potheses  ;  j-et  one  cannot 
leave  Gissing  without  wishing  that  he  had  found 
strength  and  occasion  to  express  in  fiction  these 
fundamental  ideas  of  his  maturity. 


MRS.  GASKKLL 

It  was  an  unusual  fate  that  called  upon  the 
editor  of  the  Coryihill  Magazme,  within  a  period 
of  a  few  months,  to  supply  the  missing  conclu- 
sions of  two  such  novels  as  Denis  Dtival  and 
Wives  and  Daughters.  The  last  number  of  Thack- 
eray's half-told  story,  with  its  cetera  valde  desider- 
antur,  appeared  in  the  issue  of  June,  1864:  in  the 
same  magazine  for  January,  1866,  Mrs.  Gaskell's 
long  contribution  came  to  an  abrupt  end,  fortu- 
nately all  but  finished  when  her  busy  hand  was 
stopped.  "We  are  saying  nothing  now  of  the 
merely  intellectual  qualities  displayed  in  these 
later  works,"  wrote  Frederick  Greenwood  in  his 
notice  of  Mrs.  Gaskell ;  ' '  twenty  years  to  come, 
that  may  be  thought  the  more  important  ques- 
tion." Well,  just  twice  twenty  years  were  to 
elapse  before  the  Master  of  Peterhouse  was  to 
answer  that  question  so  happily  in  the  Introduc- 
tions to  her  complete  works.  ^  He  has  left  not  a 
great  deal  for  the  critical  gleaner  to  say.  There 
is,  in  fact,  nothing  recondite  in  either  the  beauties 

'  The  Works  of  Mrs.  Gaskell.  In  eight  volumes. 
Knutsford  edition.  With  a  General  Biographical  Intro- 
duction, and  a  Critical  Introduction  to  each  volume, 
by  Dr.  A.  W.  Ward,  who  has  received  the  kind  assistance 
of  the  Misses  Gaskell.  New  York :  G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons.     1906. 

66 


MRS.    GASKELL  67 

or  the  limitations  of  Mrs.  Gaskell's  genius,  and 
my  desire  is  merely  to  invite  others  to  the  pleas- 
ure these  well-edited  books  have  given  me.  We 
have  all  of  us  read  Cranford,  and  some  of  us 
Wives  and  Daughters ;  but  how  many  of  the 
younger  generation  are  familiar  with  the  pathos 
of  Ruth;  or  the  deeper  pity  of  the  labour  tales, 
Mary  Barton  and  North  and  South  ;  or  the  ming- 
led satire  and  regret  of  My  Lady  Ludlow  ?  How 
many  are  familiar  with  her  riper  work— with  that 
humble  tragedy  of  the  sea  and  the  moors,  Sylvia's 
Lovers;  or  that  flawless,  radiant  idyl,  Cousin 
Phillis  f  And  to  these  must  be  added  the  long 
series  of  short  stories  whose  names  almost  had 
been  forgotten. 

There  are,  as  may  be  seen  from  this  list,  two 
main  sources  of  inspiration  in  Mrs.  Gaskell's 
writing,  the  labour  troubles  of  the  cities  and  the 
sequestered  peace  of  the  country,  corresponding 
to  the  divisions  of  her  own  Hfe.  She  was  bom  in 
London,  in  1810,  her  father,  William  Stevenson, 
being  a  man  of  some  intellectual  distinction.  But 
her  mother  died  within  a  month  after  the  child's 
birth,  and  the  little  Elizabeth  grew  up  with 
her  maternal  relatives  in  Knutsford,  a  town  of 
Cheshire  lying  some  fifteen  miles  south  of  Man- 
chester. Her  home  here  was  the  house  of  Mrs. 
Lumb,  her  mother's  sister  ;  but  she  must  have 
seen  a  good  deal  of  her  uncle,  Peter  Holland,  the 
physician  of  the  town,  who  is  supposed  to  have 
furnished  the  model  for  Mr.  Harrison  and  for  Mr. 


68  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Gibson  of  Wives  and  Daughters.  Her  grandfather, 
Samuel  Holland,  was  a  gentleman  farmer  living 
at  Sandle  Bridge,  two  or  three  miles  distant. 
Here  she  drew  in  part  her  pictures  for  the  Wood- 
ley  of  Cranford  and  for  Hope  Farm  of  Cousin 
Phillis.  "  The  aspect  of  the  country  was  quiet 
and  pastoral,"  she  writes  of  that  famous  visit  of 
the  Cranford  ladies  to  Mr.  Holbrook's,  which 
must  have  been  like  so  many  of  her  own  excur- 
sions to  Grandfather  Holland' s.  ' '  Woodley  stood 
among  fields;  and  there  was  an  old-fashioned 
garden  where  roses  and  currant-bushes  touched 
each  other,  and  where  the  feathery  asparagus 
formed  a  pretty  background  to  the  pinks  and 
gilly-flowers  ;  there  was  no  drive  up  to  the  door. 
We  got  out  at  a  little  gate,  and  walked  up  a 
straight  box-edged  path."  But  the  land  was  not 
without  its  heroic  traditions.  The  great  Clive 
had  gone  to  school  at  Knutsford,  was  perhaps 
connected  with  the  Holland  family  (his  mother 
was  a  Gaskell),  and  had  certainly  spent  some  of 
his  holidays  at  Sandle  Bridge,  where  he  had  dis- 
played his  youthful  prowess,  and  alarmed  his 
hosts,  by  jumping  from  the  round  ball  of  one 
gate-post  to  the  other.  When  Mrs.  Gaskell  came 
to  describe  her  Hope  Farm,  she  did  not  forget 
that  famous  entrance  to  her  grandfather's  place  : 

There  was  a  garden  between  the  house  and  the  shady, 
grass}'  lane  ;  I  afterwards  found  that  this  garden  was 
called  the  court  ;  perhaps  because  there  was  a  low  wall 
round  it,  with  an  iron  railing  on  the  top  of  the  wall,  and 


MRS.    GASKELL  69 

two  great  gates  between  pillars  crowned  with  stone  balls, 
for  a  state  entrance  to  the  flagged  path  leading  up  to  the 
front  door.  It  was  not  the  habit  of  the  place  to  go  in 
either  by  these  great  gates  or  by  the  front  door  ;  the 
gates,  indeed,  were  locked,  as  I  found,  though  the  door 
stood  wide  open.  I  had  to  go  round  by  a  side-path, 
slightly  worn,  on  a  broad,  grassy  way,  which  led  past 
the  court-wall,  past  a  horse-mount,  half  covered  with 
stone-crop  and  a  little  wild  yellow  fumitory,  to  another 
door — "the  curate,"  as  I  found  it  was  termed  by  the  mas- 
ter of  the  house,  while  the  front  door,  "handsome  and 
all  for  show,"  was  termed  "the  rector." 

Woodley  atid  Hope  Farm  are  not  quite  the  same, 
and  neither  of  them  is  the  exact  reproduction  of 
the  place  visited  by  the  girl  Elizabeth,  but  they 
show  how  intimately  the  recollections  of  her 
country  life  passed  into  her  later  work.  It  is  not 
so  stated  in  the  biography,  but  it  would  be  safe 
to  infer  that  Samuel  Holland  was  a  lover  of  books, 
for  we  remember  how  Mr.  Holbrook  read  Locksley 
Hall  to  the  ladies  in  his  cluttered  library,  and 
how  Mr.  Holman  quoted  Virgil  in  the  fields  of 
Hope  Farm,  when  they  came  upon  ' '  a  sudden 
burst  of  the  tawny,  ruddy  evening  landscape." 

Such  was  the  serene  setting  of  her  early  life  ; 
to  her  maturer  years  came  a  serenity  of  another 
sort.  In  her  twenty-second  year  she  was  married 
in  the  parish  church  at  Knutsford  to  the  Rev. 
William  Gaskell,  joint  minister  of  the  Unitarian 
chapel  in  Cross  Street,  Manchester.  Mr.  Gaskell 
was  a  man  of  large  attainments  and  refinement, 
who  for  several  years  held  the  post  of  professor  of 


7o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

English  history  and  literature  in  Manchester 
New  College.  Their  home,  at  No.  84  Plymouth 
Grove,  became  a  centre  of  cultivated  interests  in 
a  community  more  concerned  with  the  laws  of 
trade  than  with  the  canons  of  taste.  But  there 
was  no  shirking  of  the  more  painful  realities. 
As  a  minister's  wife,  the  poverty  and  rebellion  of 
those  years  must  have  knocked  at  her  doors,  and 
she  was  not  afraid  also  to  face  them  in  their 
haunts.  In  particular  she  saw  a  good  deal  of  the 
working  people  in  the  company  of  her  friend, 
Susanna  Winkworth,  had  attended  their  debates 
and  visited  their  homes,  and  knew  their  griev- 
ances and  errors.  And  so,  in  a  season  of  affliction, 
she  sought  naturally  to  lose  her  personal  grief  in 
this  sympathy  with  the  poor.  She  had  already 
written  one  or  two  briefer  pieces  when,  after  the 
death  of  her  infant  son,  she  began  her  first  labour 
story,  Mary  Barton.  This  was  written  in  the 
years  1845-47,  and  published  in  1848 — significant 
dates.  Her  other  labour  story,  North  and  So2ith, 
was  written  as  a  serial  for  Dickens'  Household 
Words,  in  1854-55,  ^^^  then  issued  as  a  complete 
work.  The  material  was  ready  to  her  hand, 'and, 
indeed,  no  one  of  Mrs.  Gaskell's  sensitiveness 
could  have  lived  in  the  heart  of  manufacturing 
England  during  the  "hungry  forties"  without 
reflecting  the  trouble  of  the  times.  All  during 
that  half  century,  while  the  wealth  of  the  country 
was  piling  up,  there  had  been  recurring  periods 
of  extreme  depression  for  the  labouring  classes. 


MRS.    GASKELL  7 1 

The  Chartist  movement  beginning  in  '38  ;  the 
Anti-Corn-Law  L^ague.established  by  Cobden  and 
Bright,  in  Manchester,  in  '39,  leading  to  the  re- 
peal of  the  Com  laws  in  '46 ;  the  failure  of  the 
Irish  potato  crop  in  '45,  sending  hordes  of  poor 
unskilled  Irish  to  take  the  place  of  EngHsh  work- 
ers ;  the  upheaval  of  '48— these  are  a  few  of  the 
familiar  dates  that  mark  the  epoch.  And  fiction 
responded  loyally  to  these  popular  appeals  as  any 
reader  of  the  novels  of  the  day  can  tell.  Shirley, 
published  in  '49;  Disraeli's  Sybil  ('45),  Hard 
Times  ('54),  and  a  little  \2XQX  John  Halifax,  Gen- 
tleman ('57),  are  names  that  will  occur  to  every 
one,  and  they  are  but  the  beginning  of  the  list. 
We  have  once  more  in  quite  recent  years  seen 
this  problem  of  the  toiling  masses  take  possession 
of  fiction,  but  how  difierent  is  the  spirit  of  the 
writers  then  and  now  ! 

The  chief  cause  of  the  evil  in  Mrs.  Gaskell's 
day  was  the  rapid  change  in  economic  conditions 
due  to  the  newly  invented  methods  of  manufac- 
ture. Carlyle,  in  his  Chartism  (1840),  stated  the 
case  with  his  usual  emphasis  and  something 
more  than  his  usual  adherence  to  facts  : 

With  all  this  it  is  consistent  that  the  wages  of  "  skilled 
labour,  "  as  it  is  called,  should  in  many  cases  be  higher 
than  they  ever  were  :  the  giant  Steam-engine  in  a  giant 
English  Nation  will  here  create  a  violent  demand  for 
labour,  and  will  there  annihilate  demand.  But,  alas,  the 
great  portion  is  not  skilled;  the  millions  are  and  must 
be  skill-less,  where  strength  alone  is  wanted  ;  ploughers, 
delvers,  borers;  hewers  of  wood  and  drawers  of  water; 


^2  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

menials  of  tlie  Steam-engine,  only  the  chief  menials  and 
immediate  5o^-servants  of  which  require  skill.  English 
Commerce  stretches  its  fibres  over  the  whole  Earth  ;  sen- 
sitive literally,  nay,  quivering  in  convulsion,  to  the 
farthest  influences  of  the  Earth.  The  huge  demon  of 
Mechanism  smokes  and  thunders,  panting  at  his  great 
task,  in  all  sections  of  English  land  ;  changing  his  s/iafie 
like  a  very  Proteus  ;  and  infallibly  at  every  change  of 
shape,  oversetting  whole  multitudes  of  workmen,  and  as 
if  with  the  waving  of  his  shadow  from  afar,  hurling  them 
asunder,  this  way  and  that,  in  their  crowded  march  and 
course  of  work  or  traflBc;  so  that  the  wisest  no  longer 
knows  his  whereabout. 

That  was  the  main  cause,  cruel  enough  in  its 
action,  though  perhaps  unavoidable.  But  the 
bitterness  of  the  suffering  was  magnified  by  two 
opposite  circumstances.  Since  Adam  Smith's  day 
the  so-called  ' '  mercantile  system  ' '  of  taxes  and 
restrictions  on  commerce  had  been  gradually  fall- 
ing into  disfavour;  but  in  1773  Parliament  had 
passed  the  Corn  laws,  by  which  foreign  wheat 
was  allowed  to  enter  the  country  only  when  the 
price  was  high.  Despite  the  distress  inflicted  by 
them  on  the  city  poor,  these  laws,  until  a  revolu- 
tion threatened,  were  kept  in  force  by  the  great 
land-owners  who  perceived  their  wealth  and  power 
transferring  to  the  manufacturing  class  and  natu- 
rally resented  the  change.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
new  doctrine  of  laissez-faire  which  began  to  gov- 
ern the  manufacturing  world,  was  not  without  its 
answering  evil.  As  a  revolt  from  the  imbecilities 
of  the  ' '  mercantile  system, ' '  the  new  economics 


MRS.    GASKELL  73 

was  one  of  the  surest  steps  in  advance  of  the 
eighteenth  century  ;  as  the  institutor  of  free  trade 
it  was,  we  may  suppose,  permanently  valuable  ; 
but  in  its  moral  aspects,  as  it  came  to  be  inter- 
preted by  the  Manchester  school  of  Cobden  and 
Bright,  it  was  one  of  the  crudest  and  harshest 
creations  of  the  human  brain.  To  strip  men  of 
all  their  faculties  save  those  productive  commer- 
cially, to  make  cash  payment,  as  Carlyle  in- 
veighed, the  universal  sole  nexus  of  man  to  man, 
to  find  in  supply-and-demand  a  suflScient  substi- 
tute for  duty  and  mercy — what  better  name  could 
be  given  to  this  than  the  "  dismal  science  "  ?  The 
reaction  from  that  heartless  trust  in  let-alone  is 
felt  to-day  in  the  humanitarian  palterings  with 
the  laws  of  retributive  justice  and  in  the  excesses 
of  Socialism.  In  Mrs.  Gaskell's  day  hostility  to 
the  system  could  be  traced  up  and  down  the 
countrj^  in  riot  and  misery,  in  sullen  plottings, 
and  vociferous  appeals  to  Parliament. 

And  fiction  has  corresponded  to  these  different 
conditions.  In  a  word,  the  elder  novelist  under- 
took to  awaken  a  sense  of  obligation  and  pity  in 
the  strong  toward  the  weak  ;  whereas  too  often 
to-day  the  purpose  of  the  reforming  writer  is  to 
preach  a  millennium  of  brotherly  love  to  be 
achieved  through  inflaming  the  hatred  of  the 
poor  against  the  rich.  There  were  exceptions 
then,  of  course,  as  there  are  now.  Rumblings  of 
the  purely  Jacobin  clamour  were  still  heard,  as 
in  the  imprecations  of  the  Corn  Law  Rhymer  : 


74  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Avenge  the  plunder'd  poor,  oh  Lord! 
But  not  with  fire,  but  not  with  sword, 
Not  as  at  Peterloo  they  died. 
Beneath  the  hoofs  of  coward  pride. 
Avenge  our  rags,  our  chains,  our  sighs, 
The  famine  in  our  children's  eyes! 
But  not  with  sword — no,  not  with  fire 
Chastise  Thou  Britain's  locustry! 
Lord,  let  them  feel  Thy  heavier  ire  ; 
Whip  them,  oh  Lord!  with  poverty! 
Then,  cold  in  soul  as  coffin'd  dust, 
Their  hearts  as  tearless,  dead,  and  dry, 
Let  them  in  outraged  mercy  trust. 
And  find  that  mercy  they  deny! 

But  even  here  the  cry  is  for  mercy  from  above. 
Carlyle  was  the  prophet  of  revolt  against  political 
indiflferentism,  and  his  words  might  be  written 
down  as  the  motto  of  much  of  the  labour  fiction 
of  the  day  :  "  '  Guide  me,  govern  me  !  I  am 
mad,  and  miserable,  and  cannot  govern  myself  I ' 
Surely  of  all  'rights  of  man,'  this  right  of  the 
ignorant  man  to  be  guided  by  the  wiser,  to  be, 
gently  or  forcibly,  held  in  the  true  course  by  him, 
is  the  indisputablest. "  To  Disraeli  this  right  to 
be  governed  took  the  form  of  an  imaginative  re- 
storation of  the  older  hierarchy  of  society.  Such 
was  the  "Young  England"  he  called  upon  in 
Coiiingsby  and  Sybil  and  elsewhere.  In  place  of 
the  "Venetian  oligarchy"  of  factious  nobles, 
there  was  to  be  a  rebalancing  of  the  three  estates 
after  the  ideal  of  Bolingbroke  and  Burke  ;  in  place 
of  the  Manchester  cash-nexus,  the  weak  were  to 
be  bound  to  the  strong  by  loyalty,  and  the  strong 


MRS.    GASKELL  75 

to  the  weak  by  duty.  Mrs.  Gaskell  looked  for 
relief  rather  to  the  more  feminine  qualities  of  the 
heart.  "  They'n  screwed  us  down  to  th'  lowest 
peg,  in  order  to  make  their  great  big  fortunes, 
and  build  their  great  big  houses,"  cries  one  of 
the  starving  workers,  "and  we,  why  we're  just 
clemming,  many  and  many  of  us.  Can  you  say 
there 's  nought  wrong  in  this  ?  ' '  And  from  this 
clemming — "starving,"  the  dreadful  word  runs 
like  a  chorus  through  both  these  novels— grows 
the  moral  tragedy  of  the  plots.  Thus,  John 
Barton  kills  the  son  of  his  employer,  Mr.  Carson, 
driving  himself  into  haunted  exile  and  throwing 
the  suspicion  of  the  murder  on  the  lover  of  his 
daughter  Mary.  The  scene  of  reconciliation, 
when  at  last  Barton  comes  home  broken  by  re- 
morse, and  the  enemies  meet  face  to  face  in  his 
desolate  home,  may  be  quoted  both  as  an  illustra- 
tion of  Mrs.  Gaskell's  creed  and  as  a  specimen  of 
her  earlier  dramatic  style  : 

John  himself  stood  up,  stiflFand  rigid,  and  replied 

"Mary,  wench!  I  owe  him  summut.  I  will  go  die, 
where,  and  as  he  wishes  me.  Thou  hast  said  true,  I  am 
standing  side  by  side  with  Death;  and  it  matters  little 
where  I  spend  the  bit  of  time  left  of  life.  That  time  I 
must  pass  wrestling  with  my  soul  for  a  character  to  take 
into  the  other  world.  I '11  go  where  you  see  fit,  sir.  He's 
innocent,"  faintly  indicating  Jem,  as  he  fell  back  in  his 
chair.  .  .  . 

But  as  Mr.  Carson  was  on  the  point  of  leaving  the 
house  with  no  sign  of  relenting  about  him,  he  was  stopped 
bj'John  Barton,  who  had  risen  once  more  from  his  chair, 
and  stood  supporting  himself  on  Jem,  while  he  spoke. 


^6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

*'  Sir,  one  word  !  My  hairs  are  grey  with  suffering, 
and  yours  with  years  " 

"And  have  I  had  no  suflFering?  "  asked  Mr.  Carson,  as 
if  appealing  for  sympathy,  even  to  the  murderer  of  his 
child. 

And  the  murderer  of  his  child  answered  to  the  appeal, 
and  groaned  in  spirit  over  the  anguish  he  had  caused. 

"  Have  I  had  no  inward  suflFering  to  blanch  these  hairs  ? 
Have  I  not  toiled  and  struggled  even  to  these  years  with 
hopes  in  my  heart  that  all  centred  in  my  boy  ?  I  did  not 
speak  of  them,  but  were  they  not  there  ?  I  seemed  hard 
and  cold  ;  and  so  I  might  be  to  others,  but  not  to  him ! 
— who  shall  ever  imagine  the  love  I  bore  him?  Even  he 
never  dreamed  how  my  heart  leapt  up  at  the  sound  of  his 
footstep,  and  how  precious  he  was  to  his  poor  old  father. 
And  he  is  gone— killed — out  of  the  hearing  of  all  loving 
^ords — out  of  my  sight  for  ever.  He  was  my  sunshine, 
and  now  it  is  night!  Oh,  my  God!  comfort  me,  comfort 
me!  "  cried  the  old  man  aloud. 

The  eyes  of  John  Barton  grew  dim  with  tears.  Rich 
and  poor,  masters  and  men,  were  then  brothers  in  the 
deep  suflFering  of  the  heart ;  for  was  not  this  the  very 
anguish  he  had  felt  for  little  Tom,  in  years  so  long  gone 
by  that  they  seemed  like  another  life  ? 

The  mourner  before  him  was  no  longer  the  employer, 
a  being  of  another  race,  eternally  placed  in  antagonistic 
attitude,  ...  no  longer  the  enemy,  the  oppressor,  but  a 
very  poor  and  desolate  old  man. 

And  SO  the  chastened  master  of  men,  now  but 
a  man  himself,  goes  out  to  ponder  on  the  causes 
of  suflFering  and  hatred,  and  becomes  in  his  own 
way  a  reformer.  His  new  desire  was  "that  a 
perfect  understanding,  and  complete  confidence 
and  love,  might  exist  between  masters  and  men  ; 
.  .  .  and  to  have  them  bound  to  their  employers 


MRS.    GASKELL  "]"] 

by  ties  of  respect  and  aflfection,  not  by  mere  money 
bargains  alone  ;  in  short,  to  acknowledge  the 
Spirit  of  Christ  as  the  regulating  law  between 
both  parties." — How  strangely  old-fashioned  the 
phrases  sound  ;  how  far  we  have  removed  our 
theories  from  that  simple  trust !  Turn  from  Mrs. 
Gaskell  to  the  bleak  skepticism  of  Gissing's 
Nether  World  or  the  chapters  oi  Life' s  Morning 
that  run  parallel  in  theme  with  Mary  Barton  ;  or 
compare  the  doctrine  of  class  consciousness  so 
diligently  proclaimed  by  some  of  our  living 
American  novelists — and  how  different  the  world 
we  are  in  !  What  novelist  to-day  would  dare  to 
indulge  in  a  sentimental  outcry  to  the  rich,  like 
that  of  Dickens  in  The  Old  Curiosity  Shop  to 
"  those  who  rule  the  destinies  of  nations"! 
Whether  economically  or  not,  the  advantage  ar- 
tistically was  certainly  with  our  elders.  Through 
their  appeal  and  warning  we  seem  to  hear,  in 
tones  confused  it  may  be  by  the  perplexities  of 
long  experience  and  by  much  half-knowledge,  the 
cry  of  the  Greek  stage,  Alas,  oh  generations  of 
men  !  and  of  all  great  literature  ;  and  the  reader 
is  softened  and  broadened  by  association  with  the 
ancient  pity  of  human  life.  Our  modem  fiction 
of  the  Zola-Tolstoy  school  ma}^  be  more  effective, 
though  even  this  is  doubtful,  in  immediate  re- 
form, but  to  the  reader  it  brings  only  a  harsh 
contraction  of  spirit,  and  its  end  is  in  hatred  and 
revolution  and  palsy  and  decay. 

The  moral  of  North  and  South  is  the  same  as 


78  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

that  of  Mary  Barton,  with,  perhaps,  a  stronger 
touch  of  emphasis  on  the  hardships  undergone  by 
the  masters ;  and  the  reconcihation  comes  about 
by  the  more  orthodox  means  of  marriage.     But  it 
must  not  be  supposed  that  the  didactic  purpose 
is  unpleasantly  prominent  in  either  tale,     Mrs, 
Gaskell  wrote,  not  because  she  had  a  lesson  to 
inculcate,  but  because  her  heart  was  moved  by 
the  blind  suffering  about  her  and  her  mind  ab- 
sorbed by  the  problem  of  these  contending  char- 
acters.    Nor  is  the  colour  of  the  stories  one  of 
unrelieved  darkness.     Especially  there  is  a  play 
of  Hght  in  the  later  book,  in  the  pretty  opening 
idyl  at  Helstone,  amid  the  New  Forest,  "like  a 
village  in  a  poem — in  one  of  Tennyson's  poems," 
made  up  of  "  the  church  and  a  few  houses  near  it 
on  the  green — cottages,  rather — with  roses  grow- 
ing all  over  them."     And  when  the  heroine  is 
transplanted  from  this   southern  home    to   the 
grime  and  stress  of  a  great  northern  factory  town, 
there  is  the  contrast  of  two  civilisations,  meeting 
and  contending  for  her  soul— the  old  ideal  of 
leisurely  manners  and   the  modem  of  stripped 
efficiency.     And  Margaret  Hale  herself  is  one  of 
the  heroines  of  fiction  we  cherish  as  we  cherish 
the  memory  of  women  known  in  our  youth.     As 
has  been  said  by  another,  we  can  almost  see  her, 
as  poor  Bessy  saw  her  in  a  dream,  "coming 
swiftly  towards  me,  wi'  yo'r  hair  blown  back  wi' 
the  very  swiftness  o'  the  motion,  a  little  standing 
off  like ;  and  the  white,  shining  dress  on  yo  've 


MRS.    GASKELL  79 

getten  to  wear. ' '  We  can  see  her  proudly  rebuk- 
ing Mr.  Thornton,  when  he  presumes  on  her  de- 
fence of  his  hfe,  as  if  she  had  acted  out  of  personal 
regard  for  him.  Mr.  Thornton  himself,  the  self- 
made  master  who  resents  any  interference  with 
the  control  of  his  money  and  his  men,  is  an  ably- 
drawn  character.  The  bending  of  his  stem  spirit 
to  human  charity  toward  his  workmen,  by  his 
love  for  Margaret,  is  told  with  consummate  skill, 
and  yet  in  the  end  the  reciprocal  yielding  of 
Margaret  has  a  touch  of  something  not  entirely 
agreeable ;  beauty  such  as  hers  needs  to  be  en- 
veloped by  strength,  but  by  more  of  fineness 
too. 

In  one  respect  Margaret,  like  the  other  heroines 
of  Mrs.  Gaskell's  books,  is  sketched  with  a  touch 
less  feminine  than  masculine.  They  are  all  crea- 
tures of  passion,  yet  we  feel  that  their  choice  in 
love  is  not  so  much  personal  and  voluntary  as  the 
result  of  that  life-force  which  beats  through  the 
world,  and  of  which  they  are  the  passive  instru- 
ments. They  are  like  vessels  charged  with  a 
subtle  and  dangerous  fluid  ;  and  this,  I  take  it,  is 
rather  man's  way  of  contemplating  women.  And 
when,  as  it  does  in  Sylvia'' s  Lovers^  this  unregard- 
ing  force  takes  for  its  vehicle  a  girl  made  up  of 
little  vanities,  what  can  the  consequence  be  but  a 
life  broken  by  the  clashing  of  its  own  strength 
and  weakness — perhaps  in  the  end  a  pathetic  self- 
abnegation  ?  One  feels  this  union  of  traits  at  the 
first  glimpse  of  Sylvia  as  she  comes  down  from 


8o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

her  hill-home  to  the  sea-town — in  her  childlike 
delight  at  the  thought  of  buying  a  new  cloak,  in 
the  nimble  vitality  of  her  body.  She  was  wilful, 
as  such  women  are,  but  she  was  to  learn  many 
things — to  learn  the  nature  of  the  forces  that 
played  upon  her.  "  It 's  not  in  me  to  forgive ;  I 
sometimes  think  it's  not  in  me  to  forget,"  she 
exclaims  ;  and  again  :  "I'm  sick  o'  men  and  their 
cruel,  deceitful  ways." 

And  with  this  portrayal  of  passion  there  goes 
an  entire  chastity  of  language — the  pudor  of  true 
art  which  would  represent  the  beauty  and  the 
devastating  attraction  of  this  force  without  evok- 
ing the  corresponding  physical  emotion  in  the 
reader  or  beholder.  I  happened  to  be  reading 
Eugenie  Grandet  at  the  same  time  with  Sylvia's 
Lovers,  and  I  was  struck  by  a  difference  in  this 
respect.  Eugenie  is  a  noble  example  of  the  pure 
heroine  whose  passive  nature  is  possessed  by  the 
blind  force ;  she  is  of  the  large,  still  type,  more 
like  Phillis  and  Ruth  than  Sylvia,  but  akin  to 
them  all  in  destiny.  There  is  in  Balzac's  por- 
trayal of  her  beauty  a  freshness  and  chastity  not 
common  in  his  books,  or,  indeed,  appropriate  to 
most  of  his  women ;  yet  even  here  he  forgets  him- 
self and  must  insinuate  how  she  would  have  ap- 
pealed to  the  Parisian  roue.  It  is  a  fault  in  art, 
for  in  the  crowded  impressions  that  come  from 
reading  such  a  description  the  brain  fails  to  dis- 
tinguish between  what  is  ascribed  to  the  woman 
herself  and  what  is  said  about  her.      Richardson, 


MRS.    GASKELL  8l 

for  example,  learned  this  lesson  of  delicacy  in  the 
interval  between  Pamela  and  Clarissa  Harlowe  ; 
parts  of  the  first  work  are  nasty,  though  written 
with  the  best  intentions,  whereas  I  cannot  recall 
in  all  the  similar  situations  of  Clarissa  a  single 
scene  that  produces  a  phj-sical  disquiet.  Now  in 
this  point  the  purity  of  Mrs.  Gaskell's  own  mind 
was  a  safeguard  against  error.  Read  the  pages 
where  Philip  watches  his  Sylvia  at  the  spinning 
wheel,  or  where  Kinraid  observes  her  knitting, 
and  again  at  her  household  work,  moving  "out  of 
light  into  shade,  out  of  shadow  into  the  broad  fire- 
light " — the  nature  of  her  attraction  is  made  suf- 
ficiently clear,  but  there  is  never  a  disturbing 
suggestion. 

The  scene  of  Sylvia's  Lovers  is  a  Yorkshire 
whaling  village,  where  the  bleak  moors  roll  down 
to  the  coast.  Always  the  sound  of  water  is  in  the 
air,  the  sound  of  ' '  the  waves  lapping  against  the 
shelving  shore, ' '  the  lights  and  murmurs  of  the  sea 
of  Aphrodite,  though  under  a  cold  northern  sky. 
But  for  the  first  of  her  idyls  she  turned  to  her  own 
home  in  the  quiet  country  just  bordering  on  Lanca- 
shire, and  it  is  well  known  that  Craiiford  is  an  ideal- 
ised, or  etherealised  rather,  picture  of  Knutsford. 
Of  thebook  there  is  no  need  to  say  anything.  It  was 
published  next  ^i\&x Mary  Bartoji,  and  could  scarce- 
ly have  been  written  without  the  experience  that 
gives  force  to  the  earlier  novel.  For,  if  we  analyse 
the  charm  of  Cranford,  it  will  be  found  to  depend 
largely,  I  think,  on  a  feeling  of  unreality',  or,  more 


82  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

precisely,  of  proximity  to  the  greater  realities  of 
Manchester.  This  contrast  was  a  part  of  Mrs. 
Gaskell's  own  life;  shemadeuse  of  it  deliberately 
in  North  and  South,  and  it  gives  their  peculiar 
tone  to  the  idyllic  tales,  as  may  be  seen  clearly 
enough  by  comparing  her  country  with  Jane 
Austen's.  What  impresses  one  in  Miss  Austen's 
books  is  a  feeling  of  stability  ;  Governments  may 
fall  in  London,  but  any  change  in  the  manners 
and  occupations  of  this  provincial  folk  is  inconceiv- 
able. In  Cranford  j  ust  the  contrary  is  true.  Here 
the  grace  is  of  something  that  has  survived  into  an 
alien  age,  and  is  about  to  vanish  away ;  there  is 
a  tremulous  fragility  in  its  beauty. 

Cranford  is  flawless  in  a  way,  but  not  more  so 
than  Cousin  Phillis,  while  its  colours  are  altogether 
paler.  Indeed,  one  scarcely  knows  how  to  praise 
the  gem-like  beauty  of  the  later  pastoral  without 
using  language  that  might  seem  to  place  it  too 
high  as  a  literary  work .  "A  Protestant  clergyman 
is  perhaps  the  finest  subject  for  a  modem  idyl  that 
can  be  found, ' '  wrote  Goethe  of  The  Vicar  of  Wake- 
/ield,  and  the  words  are  even  more  applicable  to 
Mrs.  Gaskell's  minister  Holman.  "  He  appears, 
like  Melchizedec,  to  combine  the  characters  of 
priest  and  king.  Devoted  to  agriculture,  the  most 
innocent  of  all  terrestrial  conditions  of  man,  he  is 
almost  always  engaged  in  the  same  occupations, 
and  confined  to  the  circle  of  his  family  connections. 
He  is  a  father,  a  master,  and  a  cultivator;  and,  by 
the  union  of  these  characters,  a  true  member  of 


MRS.    GASKELL  S;^ 

society.  On  these  worldly,  but  pure  and  noble 
foundations  his  higher  vocations  rest."  There 
could  be  no  better  comment  on  the  meeting  of 
the  hero  with  Phillis  and  her  father,  the  farmer- 
preacher  : 

"Well,  my  lass,  this  is  Cousin  Manning,  I  suppose. 
Wait  a  minute,  young  man,  and  I  '11  put  on  my  coat  and 

give  you  a  decorous  and  formal  welcome.      But Ned 

Hall,  there  ought  to  be  a  water-furrow  across  this  land  ; 
it 's  a  nasty,  stiflF,  clayey,  dauby  bit  of  ground,  and  thou 
and  I  must  fall  to,  come  next  Monday — I  beg  your  pardon, 
Cousin  Manning — and  there  's  old  Jem's  cottage  wants  a 
bit  of  thatch  ;  you  can  do  that  job  to-morrow,  while  I  am 
busy."  Then  suddenly  changing  the  tone  of  his  deep 
voice  to  an  odd  suggestion  of  chapels  and  preachers, 
he  added  :  "Now  I  will  give  out  the  psalm,  'Come  all 
harmonious  tongues,'  to  be  sung  to  'Mount  Ephraim' 
tune." 

He  lifted  his  spade  in  his  hand,  and  began  to  beat  time 
■with  it ;  the  two  labourers  seemed  to  know  both  words 
and  music,  though  I  did  not ;  and  so  did  Phillis ;  her  rich 
voice  followed  her  father's,  as  he  set  the  time  ;  and  the 
men  came  in  with  more  uncertainty,  but  still  harmoni- 
ously. Phillis  looked  at  me  once  or  twice,  with  a  little 
surprise  at  my  silence  ;  but  I  did  not  know  the  -words. 
There  we  five  stood,  bare-headed,  excepting  Phillis,  in  the 
tawny  stubble-field,  from  which  all  the  shocks  of  corn  had 
not  yet  been  carried — a  dark  wood  on  one  side,  where  the 
wood-pigeons  were  cooing  ;  blue  distance,  seen  through 
the  ash-trees,  on  the  other.  Somehow,  I  think  that,  if  I 
had  known  the  words,  and  could  have  sung,  my  throat 
would  have  been  choked  up  by  the  feeling  of  the  unac- 
customed scene. 

The  hymn  was  ended  and  the  men  had  drawn  off,  be- 
fore I  could  stir.    I  saw  the  minister  beginning  to  put  on 


84  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

his  coat,  and  looking  at  me  with  friendly  inspection  in 
his  gaze,  before  I  could  rouse  myself. 

It  is  a  rare  scene,  whose  dignity  verges  on  the 
humorous,  and  which  only  a  writer  conscious  of 
her  art  would  have  dared  venture  upon.  It  strikes 
the  keynote  of  the  book,  but  for  completion  there 
is  needed  that  picture  of  Phillis  in  the  first  flush 
of  her  love  for  "Cousin  Manning's  "  friend,  stand- 
ing under  the  budding  branches  of  the  grey  trees, 
and  whistling  with  the  birds  in  unconscious  de- 
light. It  is  a  fact  of  pathetic  significance  that 
Cousin  Phillis  did  not  know  the  meaning  of  her 
joy,  but  should  understand  so  well  the  reason  of 
her  sorrow  when  the  turn  came. 

In  the  end  one  is  tempted  to  ask  why  this  pas- 
toral tale  has  failed  to  establish  itself  among  our 
classics.  One  compares  it,  perhaps,  with  The 
Vicar  of  Wakefield ;  one  tests  the  scene  of  Min- 
ister Holman  in  the  fields  with  that  of  Parson 
Primrose  drinking  tea  with  his  family  where  his 
' '  predecessor  had  made  a  seat,  overshadowed  by 
a  hedge  of  hawthorne  and  honeysuckle."  Why  is 
it  that  the  later  book,  with  all  its  overtones  of  beau- 
ty and  sentiment,  does  not  rank  with  its  plainer 
rival  ?  We  are  more  deeply  stirred  by  the  events 
of  Coiisin  Phillis  than  by  that  of  The  Vicar,  yet  we 
feel  that  a  hundred  years  from  now  Goldsmith's 
work  will  be  read  with  the  same  kind  of  interest 
as  to-day,  when  Mrs.  Gaskell's  shall  be  all  but 
forgotten.  May  it  not  be  just  the  emotional  quali- 
ties of  Cousin  Phillis  which  prompt  one  to  give  it 


MRS.    GASKELL  85 

SO  brief  a  period  of  life  ?  Somehow  the  sentimental 
appeal  has  a  dull  trick  of  losing  its  effect  in  an 
astonishingly  short  time,  as  any  one  can  discover 
by  reading  the  chapters  of  Miss  Burney's  Cecilia 
over  which  Mrs.  Gaskell's  parents,  no  doubt,  like 
others  of  their  generation,  shed  copious  tears  ; 
whereas  Goldsmith's  just  mixture  of  satire  and 
sentiment,  his  freedom  from  superfluous  baggage, 
his  eighteenth-century  cleanness  of  style,  have  the 
preservative  quality  of  Attic  salt. 

But  these  are  idle  surmises.  It  is  enough  that 
the  radiant  beauty  of  Co7isin  Phillis  and  the  fuller 
charms  of  Wives  and  Daughters  are  still  contem- 
poraneous to  us,  and  that  we  can  now  enjoy  them 
in  their  excellent  new  dress. 


PHILIP  FRENEAU 

It  is  a  somewhat  disturbing  thought  that  the 
laborious  publications  most  prized  by  scholars 
are  just  those  which  are  likely  to  deprive  an 
author  of  a  real  public.  To  take  recent  examples, 
there  is  Mrs.  Paget  Toynbee's  superb  Walpole 
in  sixteen  volumes,  the  Hazlitt  in  twelve,  the 
Thoreau  in  twenty.  How  many  of  those  who 
stand  between  the  haphazard  and  the  professional 
reader,  thinking  they  must  have  the  best,  will,  if 
they  can  afford  it,  buy  the  bulky  Hazlitt,  will 
scan  its  pages,  packed  with  ephemeral  salvage, 
place  it  on  a  shelf,  and  never  again  take  it 
down  ?  They  would  actually  read  the  old  Bohn 
edition,  in  its  seven  comfortable  volumes.  And 
this  new  Freneau '  will,  I  fear,  suffer  the  same 
fate,  with  the  additional  drawback  that  no 
popular  selection  of  his  works  is  available.  I 
would  not  appear  ungrateful :  these  elaborate 
editions  are  highly  desirable,  highly  useful ;  but 
why  does  not  some  enterprising  publisher  give  us 
also  the  books  that  we  most  urgently  want — a 
selected  library,  for  instance,  of  the  literature  of 
the  American  Revolution.    Six  or  eight  compact, 

'  The  Poems  of  Philip  Freneau,  Poet  of  the  American 
Revolution.  Edited  for  the  Princeton  Historical  Asso- 
ciation by  Fred  Lewis  Pattee.  3  vols.  Princeton  :  The 
University  Librar}',  1902-7. 

86 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  87 

uniform  volumes,  well  printed,  judiciously  anno- 
tated, would  suffice.  One  volume  might  contain 
the  important  political  speeches  of  the  da)^  an- 
other the  more  interesting  familiar  letters,  another 
a  taste  of  the  Tory  poets.  Of  single  authors,  two 
of  Huguenot  descent  would  necessarily  be  in- 
cluded :  Crevecceur,  who  represents  the  moderate 
party,  crushed  between  the  fanatics  of  both  ex- 
tremes, and  whose  charming  Letters  from  an 
American  Farmer  were  brought  out  the  other 
day  in  an  excellent  reprint';  and  Freneau,  the 
shrill  spokesman  of  the  ultra-Democrats.  Two 
volumes  might  well  be  set  apart  for  Freneau,  one 
for  a  selection  of  his  prose  and  his  political  poems, 
the  other  for  his  lyrical  and  humorous  pieces ; 
they  would  afford  a  richer  mine  of  reading  than 
is  commonly  supposed,  and  would  offer  a  docu- 
ment of  rare  historic  value. 

It  has  been  pointed  out  more  than  once  that 
Freneau  was  a  half-hearted  pioneer  in  that 
"misty  mid  region  of  Weir,"  from  which  Poe, 
later  on,  was  to  bring  back  such  astounding  re- 
ports. An  idle  fancy  might  even  look  for  a 
parallel  in  the  circumstances  of  their  frustrated 
ambitions,  and  might  stop  to  compare  the  death 
of  Poe  with  that  of  the  older  poet,  who  wandered 
one  night  into  a  bog  on  his  way  home  and  was 

'  Letters  front  an  America?!  Farmer.  By  J.  Hector 
St.  John  Crevecceur.  With  a  Prefatory  Note  by  W.  P. 
Treut,  and  an  Introduction  by  Ludwig  Lewisohn.  New 
York  :  Fox,  Duffield,  &  Co.,  1904. 


88  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

found  the  next  day  dying  of  exposure — intoxi- 
cated, it  was  rumoured,  although  that  ugly  tradi- 
tion is  denied.  Freneau,  it  need  not  be  said, 
sufifered  from  no  such  disabilities  of  the  flesh  as 
Poe,  and  the  only  point  of  the  comparison  would 
lie  in  the  tragedy  of  their  genius  hemmed  in  on 
every  side  by  prosaic  surroundings.  The  later 
poet,  at  least,  "  amid  wreck  and  sorrow,"  knew 
the  solace  of  perfect  expression,  whereas  the  con- 
tinual complaint  of  Freneau  is  that  his  faculty  of 
song  has  been  baflaed  by  lack  of  sympathy.  If 
there  is  anything  real  in  the  years  that  follow  a 
man's  death,  Freneau' s  was  the  harder  fate.  Not 
a  little  of  his  best  prose  and  verse  was  contributed 
to  the  United  States  Magazine,  a  monthly  of 
Philadelphia,  which  ran  through  the  year  1779, 
and  then,  like  so  many  of  the  periodicals  on 
which  Poe  was  to  lavish  his  powers,  came  to  a 
full  stop.  A  large  class  of  Americans,  said  the 
editor  in  his  valedictory,  "  inhabit  the  region  of 
stupidity,  and  cannot  bear  to  have  the  tran- 
quillity of  their  repose  disturbed  by  the  villainous 
shock  of  a  book.  Reading  is  to  them  the  worst 
of  all  torments,  and  I  remember  very  well  that  at 
the  commencement  of  the  work  it  was  their  lan- 
guage, '  Art  thou  come  to  torment  us  before  the 
time? '  We  will  now  say  to  them,  '  Sleep  on  and 
take  your  rest.'  "  And  Freneau  himself  in  his 
verse  never  misses  an  opportunity  of  girding  at 
the  unimaginative  age  and  people  into  which  he 
was  born. 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  89 

"  Before  the  time  "  might  be  taken  as  the  text 
of  Freneau's  life.  His  family  was  of  Huguenot 
descent,  his  grandfather  having  emigrated  to  New- 
York  in  1707.  When  Philip  was  born,  in  1752, 
they  were  prosperous  merchants  in  this  city,  with 
something  of  an  estate  in  New  Jersey.  In  his 
sixteenth  year  he  went  to  Princeton,  then  under 
the  able  management  of  President  Witherspoon. 
In  the  same  class  with  him  was  James  Madison, 
whose  friendship  he  retained  through  life,  while 
just  below  him  were  William  Bradford  and  Aaron 
Burr.  Poetry  and  politics  were  in  the  air,  and 
Freneau  got  his  first  taste  of  satire  in  the  rhyming 
contests  between  the  Whig  and  Cliosophic  so- 
cieties, which  were  founded  in  his  sophomore 
and  junior  years.  Miniature  epics,  too,  such  as 
The  History  of  the  Prophet  Jonah,  and  solemn 
dialogues,  such  as  The  Pyramids  of  Egypt,  with 
the  Horatian  Debeimir  inorti,  nos  nostraque  duly 
inscribed  above,  were  not  beyond  his  aspiration 
in  those  years,  and  were  printed  in  the  later  col- 
lections of  his  works.  They  are  really  not  so  dull 
as  might  be  supposed.  We  may  smile  at  the  old- 
fashioned  manner  of  such  verses  as  these,  perhaps 
the  earliest  of  his  that  have  been  preserved  : 

In  ages  past,  when  smit  with  warmth  sublime, 
Their  bards  foretold  the  dark  events  of  time, 
And  piercing  forward  through  the  mystic  shade. 
Kings  yet  to  come,  and  chiefs  unborn  survey'd, 
Amittar's  son  perceiv'd,  among  the  rest, 
The  mighty  flame  usurp  his  labouring  breast.  .  .  . 


go  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

but  in  the  work  of  how  many  sophomores,  aged 
sixteen,  would  you  find  to-day  this  note  of  intel- 
lectual self-respect  ?  After  leaving  college  he 
taught  school  for  a  while,  first  at  Flatbush,  L.  I., 
and  then  under  H.  H.  Brackenridge,  at  Princess 
Anne,  Md.  In  1775  he  is  back  in  New  York, 
writing  political  pamphlets  and  poems.  He  was 
launched  in  his  career  :  hatred  of  the  English 
and  of  the  American  Tories  was  his  never-failing 
theme  down  to  his  death  in  1832.  It  is  not  neces- 
sary here  to  recall  the  vicissitudes  of  his  fortune ; 
the  various  papers  he  edited,  his  political  ani- 
mosities, his  alternations  of  literary  work  with 
cruising  the  seas  and  with  farming.  "  The  old 
hag  Necessity  has  got  such  a  prodigious  gripe  of 
me  !  "  he  wrote  to  Madison  in  1772,  and  he  never 
for  long  shook  her  off.  Those  who  care  to  follow 
the  adventures  of  a  poet  in  the  troubled  days  of 
"  this  bard-baiting  clime  " — and  the  story  is  well 
worth  reading — may  turn  to  Professor  Pattee's 
admirable  Life  in  the  present  edition. 

Of  two  periods  in  his  career,  however,  a  word 
must  be  said.  In  November  of  1775  he  sailed  for 
Santa  Cruz  with  a  West  Indian  gentleman,  who 
owned  large  estates  on  the  island.  During  the 
voyage  the  mate  of  the  vessel  died,  and  Freneau 
was  put  in  his  place.  A  good  deal  of  his  life 
thereafter  was  passed  on  shipboard  as  mate  and 
master,  so  that  he  is  one  of  the  few  poets  who 
write  of  the  sea  with  complete  knowledge  of  the 
trade.    It  was  no  land-lubber  who  made  the  odes. 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  QI 

On  the  Death  of  Captaiii  Biddle,  on  Capta'ni  Jones' s 
Invitation,  and  On  the  Memorable  Victory.  Nor 
was  his  experience  of  the  tropics  without  influ- 
ence. The  three  long  poems,  Sayita  Cruz,  The 
House  of  Night,  and  The  Jamaica  Funeral,  com- 
posed during  his  visit  of  two  years  to  the  island, 
are  distinctly  different  in  tone  from  the  rest  of 
his  work.  There  is  more  colour  in  them,  more 
warmth  of  imagination.  In  the  midst  of  much 
description  of  the  ordinary  amateurish  sort,  one 
comes  upon  a  perfect  image  in  a  single  line  : 

Fair  Santa  Cruz,  arising,  laves  her  waist ; 

or  upon  a  stanza  marred  only  by  his  inveterate 
taste  for  adjectives  in  "  y  "  : 

Among  the  shades  of  yonder  whispering  grove 
The  green  palmettos  mingle,  tall  and  fair. 
That  ever  murmur,  and  forever  move, 
Fanning  with  wavy  bough  the  ambient  air  ; — 

or  upon  a  whole  passage  of  haunting,  if  imperfect, 
beauty,  ending  with  a  reflection  that  foreshadows, 
so  to  speak,  the  most  famous  line  he  was  after- 
wards to  write  : 

Along  the  shore  a  wondrous  flower  is  seen. 
Where  rocky  ponds  receive  the  surging  wave  ; 
Some  drest  in  yellow,  some  array'd  in  green, 
Beneath  the  water  their  gay  branches  lave. 

This  mystic  plant,  with  its  bewitching  charms, 
Too  surely  springs  from  some  enchanted  bower  ; 
Fearful  it  is,  and  dreads  impending  harms, 
And  Animal  the  natives  call  the  flower. 


92  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

From  the  smooth  rock  its  little  branches  rise, 
The  objects  of  thy  view,  and  that  alone  ; 
Feast  on  its  beauties  with  thy  ravish'd  eyes, 
But  aim  to  touch  it,  and — the  flower  is  gone. 

Nay,  if  thy  shade  but  intercept  the  beam 
That  gilds  their  boughs  beneath  the  briny  lake, 
Swift  they  retire,  like  a  deluded  dream, 
And  even  a  shadow  for  destruction  take. 

Something  more  than  southern  warmth  enters 
into  the  stanzas  of  The  House  of  Night.  It  is  the 
fury  of  the  sudden  tropic  storm  that  he  tries  to 
express  in  such  lines  as  these  : 

Lights  in  the  air  like  burning  stars  were  hurl'd. 
Dogs  howl'd,  heaven  murmur'd,  and  the  tempest  blew, 
The  red  half-moon  peep'd  from  behind  a  cloud 
As  if  in  dread  the  amazing  scene  to  view. 

Poe  himself  never  imagined  anything  more  gro- 
tesquely weird  than  this  account  of  the  death  and 
burial  of  Death,  nor  ever  composed  lines  of  more 
sombre  magnificence  than  a  few  of  those  scattered 
through  Freneau's  poem  ;  the  pity  of  it  is  that 
so  much  power  of  imagination  should  have  been 
wasted  through  the  poet's  provincial  training. 
"^h&geyire  has  its  risks  for  the  most  wary  hand, 
and  how  should  Freneau  escape  without  a  fall  ? 
We  hardly  know  whether  to  smile  or  shudder 
when  he  writes : 

Each  horrid  face  a  grisly  mask  conceal'd, 
Their  busy  eyes  shot  terror  to  my  soul 
As  now  and  then,  by  the  pale  lanthom's  glare, 
I  saw  them  for  their  parted  friend  condole  ; 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  93 

there  is,  unfortunately,  less  room  for  hesitation 
when  he  concludes  this  grewsome  burial  of  Death : 

That  done,  they  placed  the  carcase  in  the  tomb, 
To  dust  and  dull  oblivion  now  resign'd, 
Then  turn'd  the  chariot  tow'rd  the  House  of  Night, 
Which  soon  flew  ofiF,  and  left  no  trace  behind. 

These  poems  were  written  during  the  first  years 
of  the  Revolution,  and  far  away  from  the  scenes  of 
battle  ;  but  Freneau  was  to  learn  the  meaning  of 
war  at  closer  range.  On  one  of  his  voyages  to 
Santa  Cruz,  in  1780,  his  vessel  was  captured  by  a 
British  frigate,  and  crew  and  passengers  were 
carried  to  New  York.  Here  for  a  while  he  was 
confined  in  the  horrible  prison  ships,  and  immedi- 
ately on  being  released  by  exchange  he  set  him- 
self to  describe  his  experience  in  rhyme.  If  he 
had  railed  at  Great  Britain  before,  he  now 
screamed : 

Weak  as  I  am,  I  '11  try  my  strength  to-day, 
And  my  best  arrows  at  these  hell-hounds  play, 
To  future  years  one  scene  of  death  prolong. 
And  hang  them  up  to  infamy,  in  song. 

The  descriptive  verses  and  satires  that  resulted 
from  his  travels  were  the  strongest  and  most  tell- 
ing he  ever  wrote  ;  as  much  cannot  be  said  for 
the  product  of  another  period  of  his  life.  In 
August,  1 79 1,  he  was  appointed  clerk  for  foreign 
languages  by  Jeiferson,  then  Secretary  of  State, 
and  went  to  Philadelphia  to  hve.  Two  months 
later  he  issued  the  first  number  of  the  National 


94 


SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 


Gazette,  a  semi-weekly  paper  devoted  to  the  party 
of  JeflFerson  against  that  of  Hamilton,  not  without 
side  thrusts  at  Washington,  and  to  the  favouring 
of  French  revolutionary  democracy  against  British 
monarchy.  That  was  not  a  day  when  political 
writers  disguised  their  feelings,  and  between 
the  National  Gazette  and  Fe7ino's  Gazette  of  the 
United  States  there  arose  as  pretty  a  war  of 
words  as  one  might  wish  to  hear.  The  attacks 
of  the  Federalists  are  summed  up  in  this  anony- 
mous note  inserted  by  Hamilton  in  Fenno's 
Gazette,  July  25,  1792  : 

The  Editor  of  the  National  Gazette  receives  a  salary 
from  Government : 

Quere— Whether  this  salary  is  paid  him  for  translations; 
or  for  publications,  the  design  for  which  is  to  vilify  those 
to  whom  the  voice  of  the  people  has  committed  the  ad- 
ministration of  our  public  affairs— to  oppose  the  measures 
of  Government,  and,  by  false  insinuations,  to  disturb  the 
public  peace  ? 

In  common  life  it  is  thought  ungrateful  for  a  man  to 
bite  the  hand  that  puts  bread  in  his  mouth ;  but  if  a  man 
is  hired  to  do  it,  the  case  is  altered. 

Freneau  swore  that  neither  the  "  Gazette  nor  the 
editor  thereof  was  ever  directed,  controlled,  or  at- 
tempted to  be  influenced  in  any  manner,  either  by 
the  Secretary  of  State,  or  any  of  his  friends ' ' ;  and 
Jefferson  in  a  letter  to  Washington  made  practically 
the  same  protestation.  Professor  Pattee  inclines 
to  defend  Freneau  through  this  whole  episode,  and 
certainly  his  virulent  abuse  can  be  matched,  almost 
if  not  quite,  by  the  diatribes  of  his  enemies.     On 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  95 

the  other  hand,  it  is  not  easy  to  defend  him  against 
Hamilton's  charge,  however  indirect  his  relations 
with  Jefferson  may  have  been.  His  reputation  in 
the  end  suffers  as  does  that  of  all  barkers  at  the 
heels  of  those  who  are  trjdng  in  perilous  times  to 
establish  order :  to  Washington  he  was  "that  rascal 
Freneau, ' '  to  President  D  wight  he  seemed  ' '  a  mere 
incendiary,  or  rather  as  a  despicable  tool  of  bigger 
incendiaries  ";  he  did  not  belong  to  what  the  Greeks 
in  their  days  of  faction  used  to  call  the  agathoi,  the 
good. 

As  for  Freneau,  the  writer,  those  who  expect  to 
find  in  him  anything  more  than  a  frustrated  poet, 
a  poet  of  hints  and  anticipations,  will  be  disap- 
pointed ;  but  to  those  who  approach  him  in  the 
right  spirit,  he  will  afford  a  genuine  interest.  There 
is  a  certain  charm,  a  melancholy  charm,  if  you  will, 
in  catching  the  slender  tones  of  his  lyric  moods 
here  and  there  through  the  noise  and  bustle  of  his 
political  writings.  And  often  in  these  notes  one 
detects  strange  presage  of  the  future.  Sometimes 
these  prophetic  hints  take  a  definite  form,  as  in 
that  verse  of  The  Indian  Buryiiig  Ground — the 
most  famous  he  wrote  —  which  Campbell  appro- 
priated bodily :  ' '  The  hunter  and  the  deer  a  shade, ' ' 
and  which  Hazlitt,  in  his  Table  Talk,  misquoting 
as  "a  hunter  of  shadows,  himself  a  shade,"  at- 
tributed to  Homer's  account  of  Orion.  Another 
line  of  our  poet's,  "  They  took  the  spear — but  left 
the  shield,"  was  with  the  change  of  "took" 
to  "snatched,"   borrowed  by  Scott,  who  knew 


g6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Freneau's  work  well  enough  to  call  Ezdaw  Springs 
"  as  fine  a  thing  as  there  is  of  the  kind  in  the  lan- 
guage." And  a  poetess  of  Britain  went  so  far  as 
to  dignify  the  whole  of  one  of  his  poems  with  her 
name.  But  the  real  anticipations  of  Freneau  were 
rather  his  own  outreachings  after  the  romanticism 
that  was  preparing  in  England.  On  Ama?zda's 
Singmg  Bird,  for  instance,  sounds  like  a  faint  pre- 
lude to  Blake.  Other  poems  point  further  into  the 
future.  A  set  of  verses  on  The  Power  of  Fancy, 
written  in  1770,  has  a  distinct  suggestion  of  Keats's 
"  Kver  let  the  Fancy  roam,"  which  dates  at  least 
forty-eight  years  later.  Another  poem,  The  Wild 
Honey  Stickle,  perhaps  the  most  nearly  flawless  he 
ever  wrote,  combines  in  its  rather  languid  beauty 
something  of  Wordsworth's  moralising  love  of  the 
less  honoured  flowers  with  Keats's  relish  of  fra- 
gility.    It  is  brief  enough  to  quote  entire  : 

Fair  flower,  that  dost  so  comely  grow, 
Hid  in  this  silent,  dull  retreat. 
Untouched  thy  honied  blossoms  blow, 
Unseen  thy  little  branches  greet : 

No  roving  foot  shall  crush  thee  here, 

No  busy  hand  provoke  a  tear. 

By  Nature's  self  in  white  arrayed. 
She  bade  thee  shun  the  vulgar  eye. 
And  planted  here  the  guardian  shade, 
And  sent  soft  waters  murmuring  by ; 

Thus  quietly  thy  summer  goes, 

Thy  days  declining  to  repose. 

From  morning  suns  and  evening  dews 
At  first  thy  little  being  came  : 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  97 

If  nothing  once,  you  nothing  lose, 
For  when  you  die  you  are  the  same  ; 

The  space  between  is  but  an  hour, 

The  frail  duration  of  a  flower. 


Not  flawless,  for  even  a  clever  journeyman's  hand 
could  alter  a  word  here  and  there  for  the  better  ; 
not  great  in  the  sense  that  Wordsworth's  and 
Keats' s  best  work  is  great;  colourless  as  a  whole, 
yet  with  a  clear,  unearthly  loveliness  of  its  own. 
And  the  last  stanza,  despite  the  false  "thy"  in 
the  second  line  and  the  slightly  imperfect  rhymes, 
would  do  honour  to  any  poet  of  the  past  century. 
It  has  the  slender  brittleness  of  a  costly  vase, 
marred  in  the  burning. 

But  Freneau's  chief  aflSliations  in  the  future  are 
undoubtedly  with  Poe.  No  one  could  overlook 
that-quality  in  such  a  poem  as  The  House  of  Night; 
it  is  no  less  unmistakable  in  separate  verses  and 
stanzas  scattered  throughout  his  works.  When 
he  bids  farewell  to  Columbus,  in  his  poem  of  1774, 
he  dismisses  the  discoverer  : 

To  shadowy  forms,  and  ghosts,  and  sleepy  things. 

In  an  earlier  poem  he  writes,  in  somewhat  boyish 
fashion  : 

Now,  tho'  late,  returning  home, 
Lead  me  to  Belinda's  tomb  ; 
Let  me  glide  as  well  as  you 
Through  the  shroud  and  coffin  too, 


g8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

And  behold,  a  moment,  there, 
All  that  once  was  good  and  fair — 
Who  doth  here  so  soundly  sleep  ? 
Shall  we  break  this  prison  deep  ? 

Is  not  this  in  the  very  taste  of  The  Sleeper  al- 
though without  Poe's  power  to  touch  the  reluctant 
nerve  of  awe  ?  To  follow  this  vein  of  frustrated 
romanticism  through  his  writings  is  as  if  we  should 
meet  with  a  Poe  who  had  been  snatched  into  the 
turmoil  of  abolitionism  and  the  civil  war,  and  all 
his  music  set  a-j angle  by  hate.  Freneau,  as  I  have 
said,  was  fully  conscious  of  this  thwarting  bias  of 
the  times : 

On  these  bleak  climes  by  Fortune  thrown, 
Where  rigid  Reason  reigns  alone. 
Where  lovely  Fancy  has  no  sway, 
Nor  magic  forms  about  us  play, 
Nor  nature  takes  her  summer  hue — 
Tell  me,  what  has  the  muse  to  do  ? 

An  age  employed  in  edging  steel 
Can  no  poetic  raptures  feel? 
No  solitude's  attracting  power. 
No  leisure  of  the  noon -day  hour, 
No  shaded  stream,  no  quiet  grove, 
Can  this  fantastic  century  move. 

The  muse  of  love  in  no  request — 
Go — try  your  fortune  with  the  rest, 
One  of  the  nine  you  should  engage, 
To  meet  the  follies  of  the  age. 

On  one,  we  fear,  your  choice  must  fall — 
The  least  engaging  of  them  all— 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  99 

Her  visage  stern — an  angry  style — 
A  clouded  brow — malicious  smile — 
A  mind  on  murdered  victims  placed — 
She,  only  she,  can  please  the  taste! 

It  is  true  that  a  certain  inclination  toward  satire 
showed  itself  from  the  beginning  in  Freneau's 
mind,  side  by  side  with  his  lyrical  moods,  and 
needed  only  the  impulse  of  circumstances  to  de- 
velop. By  nature,  however,  this  satirical  strain 
was  of  the  more  humane  sort,  which  sends  us  to 
the  future  for  comparisons  rather  than  to  the  past. 
Thus,  the  earliest  of  these  poems,  The  Adventures 
of  Simon  Swaiigum,  a  Village  Merchant,  would  re- 
quire only  a  little  more  avoirdupois  in  the  rhythm, 
a  little  more  of  psychological  antithesis,  to  take 
its  place  among  Crabbe's  Tales ;  it  contains,  in 
fact,  bits  oi genre  painting  which  might  be  passed 
upon  any  but  the  most  knowing  as  actually 
Crabbe's.  Where  he  differs  from  the  English 
humourist  he  tends  to  forestall  the  lighter,  swifter 
manner  of  Lowell  and  Holmes.  Now  Szcatigtim 
was  written  in  1768  and  printed  in  1792  ;  The 
Library,  Crabbe's  first  important  publication,  ap- 
peared in  1781,  and  the  Tales  not  until  1812,  To 
appreciate  Freneau's  originality  it  must  also  be 
remembered  that  in  1782  John  Trumbull,  in  his 
M'  Fingal,  was  still  trying  to  reproduce  the  form 
and  wit  of  Butler's  Hudibras,  tinctured,  perhaps, 
with  the  more  contemporary  spirit  of  Churchill. 
Swaugum,  with  two  or  three  other  genre  tales, 
notably  The  Expedition  of  Timothy  Taurus,  As- 


lOO  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

trologer,  and  Slender's  Journey,  creates  a  regret 
that  Freneau  did  not  leave  a  complete  picture  of 
American  society  in  this  humorous-satiric  vein. 
For,  after  all,  it  is  not  the  poet  of  purest  aspira- 
tion, nor  the  harsh  denouncer  of  crime,  that  hands 
down  his  age  to  us  as  a  breathing  human  reality ; 
not  Virgil  or  Juvenal,  but  Horace.  It  is  by  his 
foibles  man  lives  for  posterity ;  his  greater  vir- 
tues and  vices  make  of  him  an  example,  not  a 
companion. 

But  this  kindlier  satire  was  swallowed  up  in  the 
passions  of  the  Revolution,  and  Freneau  produced 
a  long  series  of  dialogues,  declamations,  and 
caustic  stanzas  against  poor  King  George  and 
his  servants.  Occasionally  there  is  a  grudging 
humour  in  the  ridicule  ;  oftener  mere  blank  invec- 
tive. Far  the  strongest  of  these  poems  is  the 
lurid  account  of  his  detention  on  The  British 
Prison  Ship,  already  mentioned  : 

Hunger  and  thirst  to  work  our  woe  combine. 
And  mouldy  bread,  and  flesh  of  rotten  swine, 
The  mangled  carcase,  and  the  battered  brain. 
The  doctor's  poison,  and  the  captain's  cane. 
The  soldier's  musquet,  and  the  steward's  debt, 
The  evening  shackle,  and  the  noon-day  threat. 

Of  all  his  ills  the  doctor's  poison  seems  to  have 
been  the  hardest  to  bear  : 

He  on  his  charge  the  healing  work  begun 

With  antimonial  mixtures,  by  the  tun. 

Ten  minutes  was  the  time  he  deign 'd  to  stay. 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  lOI 

The  time  of  grace  allotted  once  a  day — 

He  drencht  us  well  with  bitter  draughts,  'tis  true, 

Nostrums  from  hell,  and  cortex  from  Peru — 

Some  with  his  pills  he  sent  to  Pluto's  reign. 

And  some  he  blister'd  with  his  flies  of  Spain  ; 

His  cream  of  Tartar  walk'd  its  deadly  round. 

Till  the  lean  patient  at  the  potion  frown'd, 

And  swore  that  hemlock,  death,  or  what  you  will. 

Were  nonsense  to  the  drugs  that  stufiPd  his  bill. — 

On  those  refusing  he  bestow'd  a  kick. 

Or  menaced  vengeance  with  his  walking-stick ; 

Here  uncontroU'd  he  exercised  his  trade. 

And  grew  experienced  by  the  deaths  he  made  ; 

By  frequent  blows  we  from  his  cane  endured 

He  killed  at  least  as  many  as  he  cured  ; 

On  our  lost  comrades  built  his  future  fame. 

And  scatter'd  fate,  where'er  his  footsteps  came. 

That  is  legitimate  and  effective  satire  ;  the  in- 
dignation of  the  poet  is  fitted  to  the  abject  offeu- 
siveness  of  his  theme.  But  too  often  he  falls  into 
mere  shrewish  vituperation  : 

Said  Jove  with  a  smile — 
"  Columbia  shall  never  be  ruled  by  an  isle.  .  .  . 
Then  cease  your  endeavours,  ye  vermin  of  Britain." 
(And  here,  in  derision,  their  island  he  spit  on)  .  .  . 

There  is  more  of  the  kind,  which  I  shame  to  re- 
peat, as  Freneau  himself  was  confessedly  half- 
ashamed  to  write.  And  indeed  these  explosions 
of  poetic  rage  have  a  sad  way  of  losing  their  force 
with  time,  and  degenerating  into  mere  ill  temper  ; 
for  what  is  George  III.  to  you  and  me  that  we 
should  understand  this  hatred  ?    It  needs  genius 


IINIVTRSITY  CF  CAUFCrtNlA 


I02  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

to  be  a  good  hater  in  literature.  And  if  we  turn 
with  weariness  from  this  scolding  of  the  English, 
we  are  affected  with  something  akin  to  distress  at 
his  railing  against  his  own  compatriots,  Tory  and 
Federalist: 

What  is  a  Tory?    Heavens  and  eartli  reveal! 

What  strange  blind  monster  does  that  name  conceal  ? 

There !  there  he  stands — for  Augury  prepare, 

Come  lay  his  heart  and  inmost  entrails  bare, 

I,  by  the  forelock,  seize  the  Stygian  hound  ; 

You  bind  his  arms  and  bind  the  dragon  down. 

Surgeon,  attend  with  thy  dissecting  knife, 

Part,  part  the  sutures  of  his  brazen  skull, 

Hard  as  a  rock,  impenetrably  dull. 

Hold  out  his  brain,  and  let  his  brethren  see 

That  tortoise  brain,  no  larger  than  a  pea 

Come,  rake  his  entrails,  whet  thy  knife  again, 
Let 's  see  what  evils  threat  the  next  campaign. 

In  that  slough  of  civil  discord  were  sunk  all  his 
raptures  of  liberty  and  his  visions  of  The  Rising 
Glory  of  America.  For  not  the  least  of  his  antici- 
pations was  his  prophecy  of  America's  empire, 
and  the  conscious  assumption  within  himself  of 
so  many  of  the  traits  of  the  practical  calculating 
American  mind,  side  by  side  with  its  thin  mys- 
ticism ;  as  if  the  temperaments  of  Poe  and  Frank- 
lin were  united  in  one  person.  Here  you  shall 
read  lines  in  glorification  of  commerce  and  science, 
such  as  our  national  poet  to-day,  if  such  existed, 
might  write  ;  here  you  shall  see  the  past  dispar- 
aged in  the  classics,  and  that  self-flattering  ab- 
sorption in  the  present  which  has  sapped  the  very 


PHILIP    P^RENEAU  I03 

roots  of  the  New  World's  imagination.  And  here 
too  is  the  fullest  expression  of  that  spirit  of  re- 
bellion and  mutual  distrust  in  which  the  country 
was  unfortunately,  if  necessarily,  founded,  and 
which  has  clung  to  it  like  an  inherited  taint  in 
the  blood,  marring  the  harmony  of  its  develop- 
ment, and  suffering  a  partial  expiation  in  the 
calamities  of  the  civil  war.  There  is  a  lesson  for 
us  to-day,  and,  in  more  ways  than  one,  a  little  of 
humiliation,  in  the  career  of  our  first  poet. 

But  let  us  rather  take  leave  of  Freneau  in  a  dif- 
ferent frame  of  mind.  In  1 798  he  gave  up  active 
participation  in  editing,  and  retired  to  the  family 
estate  at  Mount  Pleasant,  N.  J.,  where  he  passed 
the  remaining  thirty-four  years  of  his  life.  Politics 
were  not  entirely  forgotten,  and  for  a  while  he 
contributed  to  the  Philadelphia  Aurora  and  other 
papers  a  series  of  amusing  letters  which  were  after- 
wards brought  out  in  book  form — the  best  of  his 
prose  writings.  But  for  the  most  part  his  time  was 
given  to  farming  in  a  half-hearted  way,  and  to  com- 
posing verses  under  the  shelter  of  a  grove  that  had 
been  started  by  his  father.  ' '  It  was  a  complete 
grove  of  locust  trees,"  writes  his  daughter,  "  sur- 
rounding a  house  grown  old  [it  was  burnt  to  the 
ground  in  18 15]  with  its  time-worn  owner,  his 
venerable  mother,  and  maiden  sister  beloved  and 
respected  for  her  many  virtues. ' '  Professor  Pattee 
gives  a  happy  picture  of  the  poet  in  his  declining 
age.  He  was  fond  of  feeding  the  farm  animals, 
but,  as  his  daughter  says, "  when  the  season  came 


I04  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

for  slaughtering  the  porkers,  he  generally  managed 
it  so  as  to  have  some  business  in  New  York,  and  he 
was  usually  absent  when  poultry  was  wanted  for 
dinner."  One  day  he  and  his  wife  found  a  slave 
asleep  in  the  field,  and  Mrs.  Freneau  took  up  the 
man's  hoe,  saying  she  would  show  him  how  to 
work.  Her  only  success  was  to  cut  down  a  hill  of 
the  young  corn,  whereupon  the  slave  chuckled  in 
triumph:  "  Ho,  ho,  Missie  Freneau,  if  that 's  the 
way  you  hoe,  the  corn '11  never  grow."  "No 
wonder  the  farm  doesn't  pay,"  she  exclaimed  in 
disgust,  "  when  even  the  slaves  talk  in  rhymes  !" 
Of  the  appearance  of  the  poet  in  these  latter  years 
we  get  the  best  description  from  Dr.  John  W. 
Francis  in  Duyckinck's  Cyclop(zdia  of  Ainerican 
Literature : 

He  was  somewhat  below  the  ordinary  height ;  in  person 
thin,  yet  muscular,  with  a  firm  step,  though  a  little  in- 
clined to  stoop  ;  his  countenance  wore  traces  of  care,  yet 
lightened  with  intelligence  as  he  spoke  ;  he  was  mild  in 
enunciation,  neither  rapid  nor  slow,  but  clear,  distinct, 
and  emphatic .  His  forehead  was  rather  beyond  the  medium 
elevation,  his  eyes  a  dark  grey,  occupying  a  socket  deeper 
than  common  ;  his  hair  must  have  once  been  beautiful, 
it  was  now  thinned  and  of  an  iron  grey.  He  was  free 
of  all  ambitious  displaj'S ;  his  habitual  expression  was 
pensive.  His  dress  might  have  passed  for  that  of  a  farmer. 
New  York,  the  city  of  his  birth,  was  his  most  interesting 
theme  ;  his  collegiate  career  with  Madison,  next.  His 
story  of  many  of  his  occasional  poems  was  quite  romantic. 
As  he  had  at  command  types  and  a  printing  press,  when 
an  incident  of  moment  in  the  Revolution  occurred,  he 
would  retire  for  composition,  or  find  shelter  under  the 


PHILIP    FRENEAU  I05 

shade  of  some  tree,  indite  his  lyrics,  repair  to  the  press, 
set  up  his  types,  aud  issue  his  productions.  There  was 
no  diflBculty  in  versification  with  him.  I  told  him  what 
I  had  heard  JeflFrey,  the  Scotch  Reviewer,  say  of  his  writ- 
ings, that  the  time  would  arrive  when  his  poetry,  like  that 
of  Hudibras,  would  command  a  commentator  like  Gray. 

That  learned  commentator  has  not  j-et  appeared, 
and  is  scarcely  needed  ;  but  it  is  agreeable  to  think 
of  the  old  poet,  in  his  not  ignoble  retirement  from 
the  world,  hearing  such  dearly-earned  praise  and 
finding  in  the  future  a  compensation  for  the  harsh 
treatment  of  the  past.  Princeton  has  done  well  to 
honour  one  of  the  most  distinguished  of  her  sons 
by  publishing  his  principal  poems  in  substantial 
form. 


THOREAU'S  JOURNAIv 

Twenty  volumes  of  Thoreau '  make  a  pretty 
large  showing  for  a  man  who  had  only  a  scant 
handful  of  ideas,  and,  in  particular,  the  thought 
of  labouring  through  the  fourteen  volumes  of  the 
Journal,  now  for  the  first  time  published  complete, 
may  well  appal  the  sturdiest  reader.  It  cannot  be 
denied  that  the  bulk  of  these  note-books  have 
no  interest  except  for  the  confirmed  nature- 
worshipper,  and,  in  part,  I  suspect,  little  even  for 
him.  Most  of  the  memorable  reflections  and 
descriptive  passages  had  already  been  transferred 
to  the  regular  books  and  lectures  ;  what  remains 
is  made  up  largely  of  trivial  daily  memoranda, 
often  written  down  in  the  field,  and  then  copied 
out  at  home  for  more  convenient  reference.  But 
there  are  recompenses  for  the  wary  reader  who 
has  learnt  the  art  of  skipping  ;  scattered  at  random 
through  the  pages  he  will  discover  fragments  of 
magic  description,  shrewd  bookish  criticisms, 
glimpses  of  serene  vision,  the  old  familiar  thoughts 
struck  out  in  fresh  language.  Thus  a  certain 
largeness  of  outlook  seems  to  be  added  to  Thor- 
eau's  known  feeling  toward  the  humanitarians 
when  we  come  across  these  words,  written  in 

'  The  Writings  of  Henry  David  Thoreau.  Walden 
Edition.  Twenty  volumes.  Boston  :  Houghton,  Mifflin, 
&  Co.,  1906. 

106 


THOREAU'S   JOURNAL  I07 

1842  :  "The  sudden  revolutions  of  these  times 
and  this  generation  have  acquired  a  very  exag- 
gerated importance.  They  do  not  interest  me 
much,  for  they  are  not  in  harmony  with  the 
longer  periods  of  nature.  The  present,  in  any 
aspect  in  which  it  can  be  presented  to  the  smallest 
audience,  is  always  mean.  God  does  not  sym- 
pathise with  the  popular  movements."  And  for 
description,  where  will  one  turn  for  a  more 
superbly  Rabelaisian  picture  than  this  wassail 
scene  of  the  woods  : 

And  then  the  frogs,  bullfrogs  ;  they  are  the  more 
sturdy  spirits  of  ancient  wine-bibbers  and  wassailers,  still 
unrepentant,  trying  to  sing  a  catch  in  their  Stygian 
lakes.  They  would  fain  keep  up  the  hilarious  good  fel- 
lowship and  all  the  rules  of  their  old  round  tables,  but 
they  have  waxed  hoarse  and  solemnly  grave  and  serious 
their  voices,  mocking  at  mirth,  and  their  wine  has  lost 
its  flavour  and  is  only  liquor  to  distend  their  paunches  ; 
and  never  comes  sweet  intoxication  to  drown  the  memory 
of  the  past,  but  mere  saturation  and  waterlogged  dulness 
and  distension.  Still  the  most  aldermanic,  with  his  chin 
upon  a  pad,  which  answers  for  a  napkin  to  his  drooling 
chaps,  under  the  eastern  shore  quaffs  a  deep  draught  of 
the  once  scorned  water,  and  passes  round  the  cup  with 
the  ejaculation  tr-r-r-r-r-oonk,  tr-r-r-r-r-oonk ,  tr-r-r-r- 
oonk  !  and  straightway  comes  over  the  water  from  some 
distant  cove  the  selfsame  password,  where  the  next  in 
seniority  and  girth  has  gulped  down  to  his  mark  ;  and 
when  the  strain  has  made  the  circuit  of  the  shores,  then 
ejaculates  the  master  of  ceremonies  with  satisfaction 
tr-r-r-r-oonk  !  and  each  in  turn  repeats  the  sound,  down 
to  the  least  distended,  leakiest,  flabbiest  paunched,  that 


I08  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

there  be  no  mistake;  and  the  bowl  goes  round  again, 
until  the  sun  dispels  the  morning  mist,  and  only  the 
patriarch  is  not  under  the  pond,  but  vainly  bellowing 
troonk  from  time  to  time,  pausing  for  a  reply. 

The  scene  was  written  while  he  was  living  on  the 
banks  of  Walden,  and  afterwards  copied,  with  a 
few  unimportant  changes,  into  his  book.  It  is 
but  one  of  a  hundred  examples  showing  how  the 
essence  of  his  diaries  was  pressed  into  that  and 
his  other  works.  It  is  an  example,  too,  of  the 
peculiarly  happy  inspiration  that  other  poets  than 
Aristophanes  have  won  from  the  sullen  batrachian 
song.  Thoreau  returns  to  the  same  theme  more 
than  once.  "  There  is  the  faintest  possible  mist 
over  the  pond  holes, ' '  he  writes  six  years  later, 
"  where  the  frogs  are  eructating,  like  the  falling 
of  huge  drops,  the  bursting  of  mephitic  air-bub- 
bles rising  from  the  bottom,  a  sort  of  blubbering 
— such  conversations  as  I  have  heard  between 
men,  a  belching  conversation,  expressing  a  sym- 
pathy of  stomachs  and  abdomens."  The  image 
of  these  grotesque  revellers  haunts  him,  and  has 
haunted  others,  as  if  it  were  an  obscene  parody 
of  the  fabled  singing  of  the  poets  at  the  well  of 
Hippocrene. 

Et  veterem  in  lime  ranas  cecinere  querellam — 

the  very  word  querella  is  sacred  to  the  denizens 
of  Helicon. 

Such  isolated  examples  of  wit  and  poetry  we 
stumble  upon  in  the  Journal,  and  take  our  reward 


THOREAU  S   JOURNAL  IO9 

for  pages  of  triviality.  And,  from  another  point 
of  view,  by  overlooking  the  question  of  immediate 
interest  altogether,  we  may  find  a  more  solid  profit 
in  these  volumes.  As  a  record  written  in  large  of 
the  life  of  which  Walden  expresses,  so  to  speak, 
the  quintessential  meaning,  these  private  and  gar- 
rulous memoranda  have  a  real  value  of  corrobora- 
tion. They  show  the  utter  sincerity  of  the  man  ; 
in  their  large  placid  current  we  perceive  the  still- 
ness of  his  nature,  and  are  further  assured  that 
his  dramatic  escape  to  the  woods  was  not  a  bit  of 
posing,  nor  a  calculated  exploit  for  "copy,"  but 
an  experience  quite  harmonious  with  the  tenor  of 
his  days.  And  this  knowledge  is  precious;  for 
the  distinction  of  Thoreau  lies  just  herein,  that 
what  other  men  were  preaching,  he  lived.  In 
transcendental  thought  he  was,  if  compared  with 
Emerson,  thin  and  derivative,  the  shadow  of  a 
shadow  ;  in  power  of  description  he  excelled 
several  of  his  contemporaries  only  through  greater 
precision  of  details — a  questionable  superiority  ; 
and  he  possessed  not  a  spark  of  Hawthorne's  cre- 
ative imagination.  But  he  had  this  one  great  ad- 
vantage, that  his  words  come  to  us  freighted  with 
the  conviction  of  experience.  * '  There  are  nowa- 
days professors  of  philosophy,"  he  observes  in 
defence  of  his  Walden  experiment,  ' '  but  not 
philosophers.  ...  To  be  a  philosopher  is  not 
merely  to  have  subtle  thoughts,  nor  even  to  found 
a  school,  but  so  to  love  wisdom  as  to  live  accord- 
ing to  its  dictates,  a  life  of  simplicity,  independ- 


no  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

ence,  magnanimity,  and  trust.  It  is  to  solve 
some  of  the  problems  of  life,  not  only  theoretically, 
but  practically." 

For  the  student  of  the  larger  intellectual  cur- 
rents Thoreau  offers  a  second  advantage,  which  is 
made  more  conspicuous  by  the  publication  of 
the  Journal.  From  his  comparative  poverty  in 
original  ideas  and  from  the  independence  of  his 
character  we  can  see,  better  than  in  the  case  of 
Emerson  or  any  other  of  the  group,  wherein  the 
transcendentalism  of  Concord  was  an  echo  of  the 
German  school,  and  wherein  it  differed.  No  one 
has  yet  traced  the  exact  channels  by  which  the 
formulae  of  romanticism  migrated  from  Germany 
to  New  England,  although  it  is  known  in  a 
general  way  that  the  direct  influence  through 
translations  in  the  American  magazines  and  else- 
where was  considerable.  Moreover,  most  of  the 
Concord  scholars  dabbled  at  one  time  or  another 
in  the  German  language.  The  strongest  impulse, 
no  doubt,  came  indirectly  through  Coleridge, 
Carlyle,  and  the  other  British  Teutonisers,  but 
once  here  it  found  a  far  more  suitable  soil  than  in 
England.  Our  people  had  just  thrown  off  the 
strait-jacket  of  Puritan  religion  and  were  revelling 
in  the  always  perilous  consciousness  of  spiritual 
liberty.  The  situation  in  Germany  at  the  time  of 
the  Romantic  School  was  not  altogether  dissimi- 
lar. Lessing  and  the  Titans  of  the  Sturm  tmd 
Drang  had  wrestled  against  the  deadening  tyr- 
anny of  the  I^utheran  Church  ;  they  had  discarded 


THOREAU'S   JOURNAL  III 

the  formalism  of  French  literary  law,  and  with  it 
pretty  much  all  sense  of  form  whatever  ;  they  had, 
with  the  help  of  Kant,  broken  down  the  official 
philosophy  of  Leibniz  and  WolflF.  On  all  sides 
resounded  the  watchword  of  Freiheit,  liberty — 
except  in  politics,  where  neither  then  nor  now 
have  the  Germans,  as  a  people,  reached  any  notion 
of  individual  liberty  submitting  to  the  discipline  of 
self-imposed  restraint,  without  need  of  the  strong 
hand  of  Government  or  the  bonds  of  socialistic 
regulation.  So  far  as  the  aim  of  the  Storm  and 
Stress  can  be  described,  it  might  be  called  a  rejec- 
tion of  the  eighteenth-century  principle  of  selec- 
tion for  that  of  universality.  The  whole  of 
human  nature  should  be  embraced  and  developed, 
and  this  development  was  to  come  through  a  set- 
ting loose  of  every  impulse  and  passion  of  the 
breast  to  run  its  full  unhampered  course.  What 
that  career  meant,  the  Geiiiesuchf,  the  Unendlich- 
keitsstreben ,  the  ri7igende  Tiia7ie7ithujn,  the  Emaii- 
cipation  des  Fleisches,  the  Seelenpriapismus — may 
all  be  seen,  by  whoever  cares  to  read  it,  in  such  a 
work  as  Wilhelm  Heinse's  Ardmghello.  Out  of 
this  blind  ferment  of  freedom  came  at  last  the 
spirit  of  a  new  and  more  compact  school,  the  cul- 
tus  of  the  Ich,  the  romantic  /,  as  formulated  by 
Fichte,  the  Schlegels,  Schleiermacher,  and  Schel- 
ling,  and  as  practised  by  Tieck,  Novalis,  and  a 
small  band  of  contemporaries. 

German  romanticism  is  often  defined  as  a  re- 
turn to  mediaeval  ideals,  and  for  a  later  period  in 


112  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  movement  such  a  definition  is  fairly  exact. 
And  even  in  the  beginning,  although  such  a 
master  of  the  school  as  Friedrich  Schlegel  pre- 
ferred to  call  himself  a  Grecian,  his  interest  in 
that  land  was  mainly  a  sentimental  nostalgia  for 
some  imagined  home  of  happiness  in  the  past ; 
whereas  his  kinship,  vague  at  first,  and  entirely 
unconscious,  was  rather  with  the  mediaeval 
Church,  Through  all  the  years  after  the  Renais- 
sance, the  memory  and  habit  of  the  Middle  Ages 
had  run  beneath  civilisation  like  one  of  those 
underground  rivers,  sending  up  its  fountains  here 
and  there,  even  in  the  disciplined  years  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  And  when  at  last  the  depths 
had  been  broken  up  by  the  wild  license  of  the 
Storm  and  Stress,  it  reappeared  at  the  surface,  its 
old  name  forgotten  and  its  current  charged  with 
many  deposits  from  its  hidden  pilgrimage.  We 
are  accustomed  to  find  the  relationship  between 
romanticism  and  the  Middle  Ages  chiefly  in  a 
common  feeling  of  infinity,  in  their  Unendlich- 
keitsstreben,  and  this  in  a  way  is  true.  But  we 
must  restrict  the  meaning  of  the  word  closely. 
In  the  narrower  acceptation,  the  Middle  Ages 
had  less  of  the  feeling  than  the  centuries  either 
preceding  or  immediately  following.  There  is 
more  of  the  infinite  in  Virgil's  loca  node  tacentia 
late  than  in  Dante's  vision  of  petrified  eternity  ; 
there  is  more  of  the  infinite  in  Shakespeare  than 
in  all  the  mediaeval  poets  put  together,  more  in 
Plato  and  Spinoza  than  in  all  the  intervening 


THOREAU S   JOURNAL  II3 

schoolmen.  What  the  Middle  Ages  reallj'  strove 
for  was  to  combine  the  ideas  of  personality  and 
limitlessness ;  the  human  personality  was  to  be 
protracted  unchanged  through  unending  periods 
of  time,  the  deity  was  to  be  at  once  human  in 
nature  and  unbounded  in  power — a  conception  of 
the  world  which  could  have  arisen  only  when  the 
feeling  for  the  infinite  as  something  positive  in 
itself  and  different  from  a  mere  quantitative  limit- 
lessness had  been  lost.  Necessarily  such  an  effort 
to  contain  the  infinite  within  the  vessel  of  the 
finite  brought  its  penalty — to  some  minds  an  un- 
wholesome exaltation  and  relaxing  revery,  to 
others,  as  to  St.  Augustine,  the  anguish  of  mortal 
self-contradiction.  This  was  the  burden  of  the 
Confessions:  "How  shall  I  call  upon  my  God, 
God  and  my  I,ord  ?  For  I  call  him  into  myself 
when  I  call  upon  him  {quo7iiavi  utiqiie  in  meipsum 
eum  vocabo,  cum  invocabo  eiini).  And  what  room 
is  there  in  me,  where  my  God  may  enter  in,  where 
God  may  enter  in,  God  who  made  heaven  and 
earth  ?  ' '  And  this  combat  between  the  thought 
of  a  limited  and  an  unlimited  personality  passed 
through  the  Middle  Ages,  disappeared  for  a  time, 
and  then  returned  to  be  absorbed  and  modified  in 
the  writings  of  the  romantic  school. 

Only  so  can  we  understand  the  Ich  which  Fichte 
erected  into  that  tortured  system  of  philosophy, 
whose  chief  value  is  that  it  gave  a  backbone  of 
rigid  articulate  logic  to  a  body  of  otherwise  flabby 
sentiment.     The  spirit  of  revolt  is  the  beginning 


114  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

of  the  movement.  Not  only  in  art  does  the  will 
or  whim  (  Willkur)  of  the  poet  suffer  no  law  over 
itself,  as  Friedrich  Schlegel  avers,  but,  more 
mystically,  this  liberty  is  necessary  for  the  ex- 
pansion of  the  I  into  the  desired  state  of  limitless 
self-satisfaction.  Here  is  no  true  sense  of  infinity, 
nor  yet  much  talk  of  God  and  the  soul — these  had 
withered  away  under  the  Aufklarung — but  an 
attempt  to  account  for  the  world  by  some  juggling 
with  the  personal  I  and  the  not-I.  In  place  of 
the  mediaeval  contrast  of  a  divine  Person  and  a 
world  created  out  of  nothing  by  his  fiat,  Fichte 
substitutes  a  formula  begotten  of  logic  on  lyric- 
ism. Bring  together  the  logical  law  of  identity 
(A  =  A,  and  not-A  is  not  =  A)  and  the  craving 
of  unrestrained  egotism,  and  you  get  the  romantic 
equivalent  for  medisevalism  :  God  is  replaced  by 
the  human  personality,  lifted  as  the  transcendental 
I  above  the  ordinary  I  of  commerce  and  society, 
and  the  world  is  the  not-I  called  into  being  as  a 
field  for  its  exercise  and  enjoyment. 

Here  is  room  for  endless  re  very,  for  unbounded 
exaltations,  for  insatiable  self-tormentings.  This 
I  has  in  practice  no  concern  with  the  reason, 
which  is  the  faculty  of  defining  and  delimiting ; 
it  has  no  kinship  with  the  will,  which  means  self- 
restraint  ;  it  is  the  child  of  the  feelings,  which 
are  essentially  rebellious  to  limitations.  So  in 
religion  there  was  a  general  repudiation  of  Luther 
and  the  Reformation,  as  the  source  of  "  a  dry 
rational  emptiness  which  leaves  the  heart  to  pine 


THOREAU'S   JOURNAL  II5 

away."  To  Schleiermacher,  the  great  preacher 
of  the  band,  religion  was  neither  reason  nor 
moralit}^  neither  thought  nor  action,  but  an  emo- 
tional contemplation  of  the  universe  by  which 
the  soul  is  thrown  into  a  state  of  indistinguishing 
revery,  and  the  I  and  the  not- 1  swoon  together 
into  one.  The  religious  feeling,  he  thought, 
should  "  accompany  all  the  doings  of  a  man  as  if 
it  were  a  holy  music ;  he  should  do  all  with  re- 
ligion, nothing  through  religion."  And  the  aim 
of  poetry  was  the  same.  It,  too,  should  avoid  all 
that  is  sharply  defined,  and  should  blend  all  the 
genres  into  a  kind  of  ineffable  music,  appealing 
neither  to  the  thought  nor  the  will.  "  Poems 
which  sound  melodiously  and  are  full  of  beautiful 
words,  but  without  any  sense  or  connection" — 
that,  according  to  Novalis,  is  the  consummation 
of  art. 

From  the  same  source  spring  those  peculiar 
accompaniments  of  the  movement — the  so-called 
romantic  irony,  the  aloofness  from  society,  the 
sacred  idleness.  Given  this  outreaching  egotism, 
together  with  this  contempt  of  limitations,  and 
inevitably  there  arises  an  inner  state  which  is  the 
modern  counterpart  of  St.  Augustine's  wrestling 
with  the  personality  of  God.  Fichte  might  argue 
calmly  about  the  world  as  not-I,  but  to  the  in- 
flamed imagination  of  a  Schlegel  this  division  of 
nature  was  a  disruption  of  self  from  self ;  it  be- 
came the  everlasting,  uncompromising  discord 
between  the  ideal  and  the  real.     The  only  escape 


Il6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

from  this  anguish  of  dissatisfaction  was  to  ascend 
into  those  towers  of  indifference  from  which  the 
transcendental  I  might  survey  the  life  of  man- 
kind, even  its  own  activities,  with  unconcerned 
irony.  In  art  this  is  the  quality  by  which  the 
artist  "  appears  to  smile  down  upon  his  own 
masterpiece  from  the  heights  of  his  spirit";  in 
life  it  is  the  feeling  which  leads  a  man  to  move 
about  in  society  as  in  an  alien  world  whose  con- 
cerns are  to  him  nothing — a  mere  piece  of  ' '  tran- 
scendental buffoonery. ' '  Hence  the  contempt  of 
business  and  of  the  Philistines  follows  as  a  kind 
of  seal  set  upon  the  romantic  soul  which  is  con- 
scious of  itself.  It  cultivates  a  divine  idleness ; 
the  summons  to  loaf  and  invite  one's  soul  came 
from  over  the  sea  long  before  the  scandalous 
outbreak  of  Walt  Whitman. 

And  the  theatre  of  this  vagrant  aloofness  was 
nature.  To  the  wanderer  in  the  field  and  on  the 
mountain  side,  with  his  spirit  bathed  in  the  shift- 
ing glamour  of  colour  and  form,  with  no  trouble- 
some call  upon  his  reason  or  his  will,  this  visible 
music  of  nature  might  seem  now  to  be  spun  like  a 
dream  from  the  depths  of  his  own  being  and 
now  to  be  absorbed  in  silence  back  into  himself 
Schelling  had  modified  this  mystic  revery  into 
a  vast  metaphysical  parallelism.  "  The  system 
of  nature,"  he  said,  "is  at  the  same  time  the 
system  of  our  spirit ";  and  again,  "  Nature  is  the 
visible  spirit,  the  spirit  is  invisible  nature."  And 
Novalis,  to  whom  thought  was  ' '  only  a  dream  of 


THOREAU'S   JOURNAL  II7 

the  feelings,"  held  that  by  a  kind  of  transcendental 
"magic,"  to  use  his  famous  word,  a  man  might 
juggle  or  shuffle  spirit  and  nature  together.  In 
his  Lehrlinge  zu  Sals  romanticism  received  per- 
haps its  purest  expression,  "At  the  well  of 
freedom,"  says  one  in  that  book,  "we  sit  and 
spy  ;  it  is  the  great  magic-mirror  wherein  serene 
and  clear  the  whole  creation  reveals  itself;  herein 
bathe  the  tender  spirits  and  images  of  all  natures, 

and  here  we  behold  all  chambers  laid  open And 

when  we  wander  from  this  view  into  nature  her- 
self, all  is  to  us  well  known,  and  without  error 

we  recognise  every  form It  is  all  a  great  scroll, 

to  which  we  have  the  key."  Whereto  another 
prophet  in  the  book  replies  in  the  language  of 
Fichte,  telling  how  a  man  is  lord  of  the  world, 
and  how  his  I,  brooding  mightily  over  the  abyss 
of  mutable  forms,  reduces  them  slowly  to  the 
eternal  order  of  its  own  law  of  being,  der  Veste 
seines  Ichs. 

Now,  of  the  systematic  romanticism  of  Fichte 
and  Schelling  there  is  little  or  nothing  in  the 
writings  of  our  New  England  transcendentalists. 
Many  of  their  ideas  may  be  found  in  Emerson, 
but  divested  of  their  logical  coherence  ;  and  as 
for  Thoreau,  "metaphysics  was  his  aversion," 
says  William  EUery  Channing  ;  ' '  speculation  on 
the  special  faculties  of  the  mind,  or  whether  the 
Not- Me  comes  out  of  the  I  or  the  All  out  of  the 
infinite  Nothing,  he  could  not  entertain. ' '  Never- 
theless, in  its  more  superficial  aspects,  almost  the 


Il8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

whole  body  of  romanticism  may  be  found  re- 
flected, explicitly  or  implicitly,  in  his  Journal  and 
formal  works.  He,  too,  had  sat  spying  in  the 
well  of  freedom,  and  the  whole  art  and  practice 
of  his  life  were  a  paean  of  liberty  :  ' '  For  a  man 
to  act  himself  he  must  be  perfectly  free."  And 
this  was  his  mission,  to  act  himself,  and  to  point 
to  others  the  path  of  freedom.  Calvinism  had 
been  discarded  in  Concord  as  lyUtheranism  had 
been  by  the  romanticists  at  Berlin.  There  is  little 
concern  in  Thoreau  with  God  and  the  soul,  but 
in  its  place  a  sense  of  individualism,  of  sublime 
egotism,  reaching  out  to  embrace  the  world  in 
ecstatic  communion.  His  religion  was  on  the 
surface  not  dissimilar  to  Schleiermacher's  mystical 
contemplation  of  the  universe  ;  * '  vast  films  of 
thought  floated  through  my  brain,"  he  says  on 
one  occasion  ;  and  the  true  harvest  of  his  daily 
life  he  pronounced  "a  little  star-dust  caught,  a 
segment  of  the  rainbow  which  I  have  clutched." 
This  revery,  or  contemplation  that  spurned  at 
limitations,  passed  easily  into  the  romantic  ideal 
of  music— and  that  in  a  very  literal,  sometimes 
ludicrous,  sense.  A  music-box  was  for  him  a 
means  of  consolation  for  the  loss  of  his  brother ;  a 
hand-organ  was  an  instrument  of  the  gods  ;  and 
the  humming  wires  on  a  cold  day — his  telegraph 
harp  he  called  it — seemed  to  him  to  convey  to  his 
soul  some  secret  harmony  of  the  universe.  ' '  The 
wire  is  my  redeemer,  it  always  brings  a  special 
message  to  me  from  the  Highest."     This  is  the 


THOREAU S   JOURNAL  II9 

thought  that  occurs  over  and  over  again  in  the 
Journal.  More  particularly  in  one  passage  dated 
September  3,  1851,  by  Channing,  and  jumbled 
together  from  separate  entries  in  the  Journal, 
he  expatiates  on  this  modern  harmony  of  the 
spheres  : 

As  I  went  under  the  new  telegraph  wire,  I  heard  it 
vibrating  like  a  harp  high  overhead  ;  it  was  as  the  sound 
of  a  far-off  glorious  life  ;  a  supernal  life  which  came 
down  to  us  and  vibrated  the  lattice-work  of  this  life  of 
ours — an  -i^Jolian  harp.  It  reminded  me,  I  say,  with  a 
certain  pathetic  moderation,  of  what  finer  and  deeper 
stirrings  I  was  susceptible,  which  grandly  set  all  argu- 
ment and  dispute  aside,  a  triumphant  though  transient 
exhibition  of  the  truth. 

There  is  something  bordering  on  the  grotesque 
in  this  rhapsodical  homage  to  a  droning  telegraph 
wire,  but  it  might  be  paralleled  by  many  a  like 
enthusiasm  of  the  German  brotherhood.  Nor 
was  Thoreau  unaware  of  this  intrusion  of  humour 
into  his  ecstasy.  Like  Friedrich  Schlegel,  he  in- 
dulges in  the  romantic  irony  of  smiling  down 
upon  himself  and  walking  through  life  as  a 
Doppelgiinger : 

I  only  know  myself  as  a  human  entity  ;  the  scene,  so 
to  speak,  of  thoughts  and  affections  ;  and  am  sensible  of 
a  certain  doubleuess  by  which  I  can  stand  remote  from 
myself  as  from  another.  However  intense  my  experi- 
ence, I  am  conscious  of  the  presence  and  criticism  of  a 
part  of  me,  which,  as  it  were,  is  not  a  part  of  me,  but 
spectator,  sharing  no  experience,  but  taking  note  of  it ; 
and  that  is  no  more  I  than  it  is  you.     When  the  play, 


I20  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

it  may  be  the  tragedy,  of  life  is  over,  the  spectator 
goes  his  way.  It  is  a  kind  of  fiction,  a  work  of  the 
imagination  only,  so  far  as  he  was  concerned. 

How  far  this  irony  carried  him  in  his  hatred  of 
Philistinism  and  his  aloofness  from  society,  no 
reader  of  his  books  need  be  told.  The  life  of  the 
business  man  he  compared  to  the  tortures  of  an 
ascetic,  and  the  California  gold-fever  threw  him 
into  a  rage  of  disgust: — "  going  to  California.  It 
is  only  three  thousand  miles  nearer  to  hell.  .  .  . 
The  gold  of  California  is  a  touchstone  which  has 
betrayed  the  rottenness,  the  baseness,  of  man- 
kind." Nor  did  the  daily  commerce  of  man  with 
man  come  off  much  better.  He  was  not  one  who 
would  ' '  feebly  fabulate  and  paddle  in  the  social 
slush."  "I  live,"  he  says,  "in  the  angle  of  a 
leaden  wall,  into  whose  alloy  was  poured  a  little 
bell-metal.  Sometimes  in  the  repose  of  my  mid- 
day there  reaches  my  ears  a  confused  tintin- 
nabulum  from  without.  It  is  the  noise  of  my 
contemporaries." — Could  an  image  be  more  sub- 
limely impertinent  ? 

Often  a  passage  in  the  Journal  bears  the  stamp 
of  German  romanticism  so  plainly  upon  it,  that 
we  stop  to  trace  it  back  in  memory  to  Tieck  or 
Novalis  or  one  of  the  followers  of  the  earlier  Storm 
and  Stress.  Such  are  his  scattered  observations 
on  childhood,  on  sleep,  and  the  all-enveloping 
sacrament  of  silence  ;  such  is  his  constant  thought 
of  a  new  mythology  which  is  to  be  the  end  of  our 
study  and  our  art — "  all  the  phenomena  of  nature 


THOREAU S   JOURNAL  121 

need  to  be  seen  from  the  point  of  view  of  wonder 
and  awe.  .  .  .  Men  are  probably  nearer  to  the 
essential  truth  in  their  superstitions  than  in  their 
science,"  These,  I  take  it,  are  not  cases  of  trans- 
lation or  plagiarism,  but  rather  of  that  larger 
and  vaguer  migration  of  thought  from  one  land 
to  another.  They  show  how  thoroughly  the 
transcendental  philosophy  of  New  England  had 
absorbed  the  language  and  ideas  of  German 
romanticism,   if  not  its  inmost  spirit. 

And  so,  one  may  follow  these  movements  step 
by  step — through  irony,  aloofness,  and  sacred 
idleness,  through  their  flowering  in  musical  rev- 
ery  and  communion  with  nature — and  show  how 
they  develop  on  parallel  lines  always  alike  on  the 
surface,  yet  always  with  some  underlying  differ- 
ence more  easily  felt  than  named.  And  this  dif- 
ference is  felt  more  strongly,  is  indeed  then  only 
to  be  understood,  when  we  go  back  to  that  free 
individualism  which  is  the  root  of  all  this  varied 
growth,  "  Contemplation,"  says  Schleiermacher 
in  his  second  Discourse,  ' '  is  and  always  remains 
something  single,  separate,  the  immediate  percep- 
tion, nothing  more  ;  to  connect  and  bring  together 
into  a  whole  is  not  the  business  of  the  senses,  but 
of  abstract  thought.  So  with  religion  :  it  is  hers 
to  abide  by  the  immediate  experience  of  the  being 
and  activity  of  the  universe,  by  the  individual 
perceptions  and  feelings  ;  each  of  these  is  a  work 
existing  in  itself  without  connection  with  others 
or   dependence  upon   them.     Of  derivation  and 


122  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

association  religion  knows  nothing  ;  of  all  things 
that  may  touch  her,  these  are  the  most  contrary 
to  her  nature.  .  .  .  It  is  due  just  to  this  absolute 
individuality  that  the  sphere  of  contemplation  is 
so  infinite."  Here  certainly — and  we  are  at  the 
very  heart  of  German  romanticism — is  a  doctrine 
which  the  wise  men  of  Concord  would  have  been 
the  first  to  repudiate.  "Infinity"  to  Schleier- 
macher  was  only  another  word  for  endless  variety 
of  particulars,  amid  which  the  soul  of  man,  itself 
a  momentary  atom  in  the  stream,  moves  in  a  state 
of  perpetual  wonder.  The  ideal  of  Emerson  was 
that  self-reliance  by  which  the  individual,  shak- 
ing itself  free  from  the  mere  conformity  of  man- 
ners and  tradition,  might  rise  to  the  community 
of  the  higher  nature  figured  by  him  as  the  over- 
soul  :  "In  all  conversation  between  two  persons, 
tacit  reference  is  made  as  to  a  third  party,  to  a 
common  nature.  That  third  party  or  common 
nature  is  not  social,  it  is  impersonal ;  it  is 
God."  And  Thoreau  represented  friendship  by 
the  symbol  of  two  lines  divergent  on  the  earth 
and  converging  together  in  the  stars.  I  cannot 
find  the  equivalent  of  this  in  Schleiermacher.  I 
find  rather  that,  like  the  rest  of  the  romantics, 
when  he  sought  for  the  basis  of  a  man's  nature, 
he  turned  to  pure  emotionalism,  the  very  power 
and  faculty  by  which  we  are  bound  within  the 
limits  of  our  individuality.  We  have  seen  that 
to  Schleiermacher  "the  essence  of  religion  is 
neither  thought  nor  action,  but  contemplation 


THOREAU'S   JOURNAL  I23 

and  feeling."  Let  us  see  in  what  colours  he 
pictures  this  passive  surrender  of  the  soul  to  the 
impression  of  the  world.  Thus  he  continues  in 
the  Reden  : 

Only  do  not  suppose — this  is  indeed  one  of  the  most 
dangerous  errors— that  religious  contemplation  and  feel- 
ing at  their  beginning  in  the  first  activity  of  the  soul  (des 
Gemuths)  are  severed  in  any  such  way  as  they  necessarily 
are  in  our  discourse.     Contemplation  without  feeliug  is 
nothing,  and  possesses  neither  the  right  source  nor  the 
right  power  ;  feeling  without  contemplation  is  likewise 
nothing  :  both  are  something   only  when  and  because 
they  are  originally  one  and  unseparated.   That  first  mys- 
terious moment,  which  comes  to  us  with  every  sensuous 
perception  before  contemplation  and  feeling  have  drawn 
apart,  .  .  .  fleeting  is  it  and  transparent,  like  the  first 
exhalation  wherewith  the  dew  breathes  upon  the  awak- 
ened flowers,  demure  and  tender  like  the  kiss  of  a  virgin, 
holy  and  fruitful  like  the  embrace  of  marriage.    Nay,  not 
like  this,  rather  it  is  all  this.     Quickly  and  magically  an 
appearance,  an  event,  unfolds  itself  to  a  likeness  of  the 
universe.     And  so,  as  the  beloved  and  ever-desired  form 
takes  shape,  my  soul  flees  to  her,  and  I  embrace  her  not 
as  a  shadow,  but  as  the  holy  essence  itself.     I  lie  in  the 
bosom  of  the  infinite  world ;  I  am  in  that  moment  its  soul, 
for  I  feel  all  its  powers  and  its  infinite  life  as  my  own. 
...   At  the  least  jar  the  holy  union  is  blown  away,  and 
then  first  Contemplation  stands  before  me  as  a  separate 
form  ;  I  gaze  upon  her,  and  she  mirrors  herself  in  the 
open  soul  as  the  image  of  the  departing  loved-one  in  the 
open  eye  of  the  youth.     And  now  first  feeling  rises  up 
from  within  him,  and  spreads  like  the  blush  of  shame 
and  desire  over  his  cheek.     This  moment  is  the  highest 
flowering  of  religion. 


124  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Could  anything  than  this  be  more  essentially 
at  variance  with  the  product  of  Concord  ?  The 
nearest  approach  to  it  in  substance  is  the  hedonism 
of  Pater  as  expressed  in  the  Cojidudon  to  his 
Renaissance  studies.  For  what  in  the  end  is  this 
religion  of  Schleiermacher's  but  that  culture  of  the 
fleeting  artistic  impression  which  Pater  taught : 
' '  Every  moment  some  form  grows  perfect  in  hand 
and  face ;  some  tone  on  the  hills  or  the  sea  is 
choicer  than  the  rest ;  some  mood  of  passion  or 
insight  or  intellectual  excitement  is  irresistibly 
real  and  attractive  for  us — for  that  moment  only ' '  ? 
It  is  but  the  modern  decking  out  of  the  ancient 
philosophical  heresy  of  Heracleitus  that  all  things 
move  and  flit  away,  which  the  English  writer 
places  as  the  motto  of  his  essay.  I  would  not  be 
unappreciative  of  the  great  German  divine,  but 
I  cannot  sever  his  unctuous  preaching  of  emo- 
tionalism from  the  actual  emotions  which  ruled 
among  the  coterie  to  whom  his  discourses  were 
addressed.  When  he  turns  from  his  image  of  the 
bridal  of  the  soul  and  the  universe  to  the  fable  of 
Paradise,  and  declares  that  only  through  the  com- 
ing of  Eve  was  Adam  enabled  to  lift  his  thoughts 
heavenward,  when  he  makes  of  love  the  only 
source  of  religion,  he  is,  of  course,  speaking  with- 
in the  acknowledged  rights  of  the  preacher.  Yet  I 
cannot  forget  the  morbid  life  of  Rousseau,  from 
whom  all  this  Gefuhlsphilosophie  is  ultimately  de- 
rived ;  I  remember  more  particularly  Heinse's 
yearning  for  some  wilderness  apart  from  the  world 


THOREAU'S    JOURNAL  1 25 

where  he  might,  like  a  Platonic  sage,  pass  his  life 
in  saintly  studies — with  lyais  at  his  side. '  I  am 
afraid  of  a  religion  which  accords  so  easily  with 
this  blending  of  Plato  and  Lais,  and  which  serves 
so  well  a  literature  whose  principle  as  announced 
by  Tieck  was  briefly  this  :  "  The  decency  of  our 
common  prosaic  life  is  unallowed  in  art ;  in  these 
happy,  pure  regions  it  is  unseemly  ;  it  is  among 
us  even  the  document  of  our  commonness  and 
immorality."  I  am  Puritanic  enough  to  dislike 
and  to  distrust  these  confusions  ;  and  it  is  because 
I  do  not  find  them  in  Thoreau  that  I  can  turn  to 
him  after  reading  much  in  the  romayitische  Schule 
with  a  sense  of  relief,  as  one  passes  from  a  sick- 
chamber  to  the  breath  of  the  fields.  Concord  is 
remote  and  provincial  in  comparison  with  the 
Berlin  and  Jena  of  those  days  ;  it  lacks  the  univer- 
sality and  culture  of  those  centres ;  above  all,  it 
lacks  the  imposing  presence  of  a  Goethe  and  a 
Schiller,  who,  however  loosely,  were  still  con- 
nected with  the  romantic  brotherhood ;  but  it 
possessed  one  great  ofiset — character, 

"  Life  shall  be  the  living  breath  of  nature," 
might  have  been  the  motto  of  Thoreau  as  it  was 
of  a  great  German.     He,  too,  went  out  to  find  the 

'  This  coujunction  of  Plato  and  Lais  is  taken  up  from 
the  decadence  of  Greece  itself.  The  Pseudo-Platonic  epi- 
gram is  well  known  :  "I  Lais  who  laughed  exultant  over 
Greece,  I  who  held  that  swarm  of  young  lovers  in  my 
porches,  lay  my  mirror  before  the  Paphian  ;  since  such 
as  I  am  I  will  not  see  myself,  and  such  as  I  was  I  cannot." 


126  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

God  of  history  in  nature,  inasmuch  as  man  is  but 
a  part  of  the  whole,  a  brother  to  the  worm — but 
the  ways  of  their  search  led  them  far  asunder. 
We  have  seen  how  on  the  surface  the  mj-stical 
revery  of  Novalis's  Lehrlinge  zu  Sais  is  akin  to 
the  ideals  of  Thoreau :  yet  follow  the  two  to  the 
end.  We  shall  see  one  of  the  scholars  of  Sais 
journeying  through  a  tropical  clime  to  the  shrine 
of  Isis  ;  we  shall  see  him  in  an  ecstasy  before  that 
veiled  goddess  of  nature;  "then  lifted  he  the 
light,  gleaming  veil,  and — Rosenbliithchen  sank 
into  his  arms."  It  is  only  Heinse's  Plato  and 
lyais,  or  Schleiermacher's  Adam  and  Eve  if  you 
will,  under  other  names.  There  is  a  taint  of 
sickliness  in  all  this.  It  corresponds  too  well  to 
the  "heavenly  weariness"  of  Novalis  himself, 
as  he  might  be  found  at  the  grave  of  his  Sophie, 
vowing  himself  to  death  for  lofty  ensample  of 
love's  eternal  faithfulness,  and  in  a  short  while 
after  discovering  his  religion  incarnate  in  an- 
other woman. 

Now  there  was  no  Lai's  in  Thoreau 's  life,  no 
sentimental  identification  of  a  dead  Sophie  with  a 
living  Julie,  and  above  all,  no  rapturous  embrace 
of  both  together  in  the  person  of  the  goddess  of 
nature.  It  may  even  be  granted  that  the  absence 
of  primitive  human  emotion  is  so  pronounced  in 
his  diaries  as  to  render  them  thin  and  bloodless. 
To  lay  bare  the  sources  of  this  difference  between 
Thoreau  and  Novalis  it  would  be  necessary  to 
analyse  a  score  of  influences  silently  at  work  be- 


THOREAU S   JOURNAL  12 7 

neath  the  surface  of  his  culture — the  inheritance 
of  Puritan  religion,  denied  indeed,  but  still  making 
any  real  return  to  mediaevalism  impossible  ;  the 
British  notion  of  practical  individualism  expressed 
in  the  philosophy  of  Adam  Smith  ;  the  lesson  of 
Wordsworth's  austerity  in  the  devotion  to  nature  ; 
the  spirit  of  fine  expectancy  derived  from  the  poets 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  who  were  Thoreau's 
chief  mental  nourishment ;  the  incalculable  force 
of  Emerson's  personality.  It  comes  at  the  last 
chiefly  to  this  :  the  freedom  of  the  romantic  school 
was  to  the  end  that  the  whole  emotional  nature 
might  develop ;  in  Thoreau  it  was  for  the  practice 
of  a  higher  self-restraint.  The  romantics  sought 
for  the  common  bond  of  human  nature  in  the 
Gemuth,  Thoreau  believed  it  lay  in  character.  In 
the  Gemuth  (the  word  is  untranslatable ;  heart, 
with  the  connotation  of  sentiment,  mood,  re  very, 
is  the  nearest  equivalent)  Schleiermacher  found 
the  organ  of  religion  to  the  absolute  exclusion  of 
the  reason  and  the  will ;  there  Novalis  looked  for 
the  inspiration  of  all  art ;  communion  with  nature 
was  desirable  only  because  in  her,  too,  might 
be  discovered  "all  the  variations  of  an  endless 
Geniiitk ' '  /  and  to  this  organ  of  the  individual  per- 
son was  reduced  in  reality  the  high-sounding  Ich 
of  Fichte.  Gemuth — character,  Gefiihl — conduct ; 
in  that  contrast  lay  the  divergence  between  German 
and  New  England  transcendentalism.  "  What 
are  three-score  years  and  ten  hurriedly  and  coarsely 
lived  to  moments  of  divine  leisure  in  which  your 


128  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

life  is  coincident  with  the  Hfe  of  the  universe  ? ' ' 
asks  Thoreau  in  his  Journal ;  but  he  adds  as  a  cor- 
rective :  "  That  aim  in  life  is  highest  which 
requires  the  highest  and  finest  discipline." 
Man's  life,  he  says  elsewhere,  "  consists  not  in 
his  obedience,  but  his  opposition,  to  his  in- 
stincts," and  genius  was  to  him  another  name 
for  health.  This  was  his  resolution  and  his 
prayer : 

I  pray  that  the  life  of  this  spring  and  summer  may  ever 
lie  fair  in  my  memory.  May  I  dare  as  I  have  never  done  ! 
May  I  persevere  as  I  have  never  done  !  May  I  purify  my- 
self anew  as  with  fire  and  water,  soul  and  body !  May  I 
gird  myself  to  be  a  hunter  of  the  beautiful,  that  nought 
escape  me  !  May  I  attain  to  a  youth  never  attained  !  I 
am  eager  to  report  the  glory  of  the  universe ;  may  I  be 
worthy  to  do  it ;  to  have  got  through  with  regarding 
human  values  so  as  not  to  be  distracted  from  regarding 
divine  values.  It  is  reasonable  that  a  man  should  be 
something  worthier  at  the  end  of  the  year  than  he  was 
at  the  beginning. 

And  so,  despite  its  provincialism  and  its  tedium, 
the  Journal  of  Thoreau  is  a  document  that  New 
England  may  cherish  proudly.  It  is  the  mirror 
of  a  life,  the  record  of  romanticism  striving  to 
work  itself  out  in  actual  character,  and  shows 
thus,  as  clearly  as  the  far  greater  writings  of 
Emerson,  wherein  the  originality  of  the  Concord 
school  really  lies.  The  dangers  of  transcenden- 
talism are  open  enough — its  facile  optimism  and 
unballasted  enthusiasms— dangers  to  the  intellect 
chiefly.     Any  one  may  point  at  the  incompatibil- 


THOREAU S    JOURNAL  I29 

ity  of  Thoreau's  gospel  with  the  requirements  of 
society.  To  follow  him,  as  to  follow  Walt  Whit- 
man, a  man  must  needs  shun  the  responsibilities 
of  the  family  and  State,  and  walk  in  solitary  ways. 
Yet,  withal,  there  is  brave  inspiration  in  the 
scornful  independence  of  this  botanising  vaga- 
bond. For  the  motto  of  his  Journal  one  might 
choose  the  familiar  lines  of  Matthew  Arnold  : 

For  most  men  in  a  brazen  prison  live, 
Where,  in  the  sun's  hot  eye, 
With  heads  bent  o'er  their  toil  they  languidly 
Their  lives  to  some  unmeaning  taskwork  give, 
Dreaming  of  nought  beyond  their  prison-wall. 

•  •  •  •  •  •  • 

And  the  rest,  a  few, 

Escape  their  prison  and  depart 

On  the  wide  ocean  of  life  anew. 

There  the  freed  prisoner,  where'er  his  heart 

Listeth,  will  sail ; 

Nor  doth  he  know  how  there  prevail. 

Despotic  on  that  sea. 

Trade-winds  that  cross  it  from  eternity. 

Awhile  he  holds  some  false  way,  undebarr'd 

By  thwarting  signs,  and  braves 

The  freshening  wind  and  blackening  waves. 

And  then  the  tempest  strikes  him.  .  .  . 

And  he  too  disappears,  and  comes  no  more. 

Put  out  of  mind  the  wild  hurtling  words  Tho- 
reau  was  so  fond  of  uttering,  forget  the  ill  taste 
into  which  his  narrower  circumstances  often  led 
him,  and  there  remains  this  tonic  example  of  a 
man  who  did  actually  and  violently  break  through 


130  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  prison  walls  of  routine,  and  who  yet  kept  a 
firm  control  of  his  career.  If  his  aim  was  to  refine 
his  senses  so  that,  like  an  ^olian  harp,  he  might 
quiver  in  response  to  every  impression  of  moun- 
tain and  field  and  river,  at  least  he  sought  for 
this  refinement  by  eliminating  all  the  coarser  and 
more  relaxing  emotions  of  his  breast;  by  disci- 
plining his  will  into  harmony  with  the  pure  and 
relentless  laws  of  universal  being.  And  if  the 
terms  of  his  practical  philosophy  may  be  traced 
back  through  the  German  romanticists  to  Rous- 
seau's ideal  of  a  return  to  nature,  yet  his  sympa- 
thetic knowledge  of  hard  savage  life  among  the 
Indians  and  the  tradition  of  New  England's 
struggle  with  the  wilderness  kept  him,  always 
in  act  and  generally  in  words,  from  sentimental 
softening  of  the  reality. 

Perhaps,  in  the  end,  what  remains  in  the  mind 
of  the  reader  is  the  sense  of  constant  expectancy 
that  plays  on  almost  every  page  of  his  works. 
"Is  not  the  attitude  of  expectation  somewhat 
divine?"  he  asks  in  one  of  his  letters,  and  al- 
ways it  is  morning  with  him.  The  clearest 
expression  of  this  buoyancy  of  the  dawn  may 
be  found  in  the  account  of  A  Walk  to  Wachu- 
.  sett^  but  it  is  never  long  absent  from  the  Journal 
and  was  a  characteristic  of  his  daily  life.  He 
walked  the  fields  like  one  who  was  on  the  alert 
for  some  divine  apparition,  and  Mr.  M,  D.  Con- 
way has  observed  that  a  strange  light  seemed  to 
shine  on  his  countenance  when  abroad.     This, 


THOREAU S   JOURNAL  131 

too,  is  a  trait  of  the  romantic  spirit,  no  doubt ; 
but  its  quality  in  Thoreau  does  not  point  to 
Germany.  It  came  to  him  in  part  from  his  birth 
in  a  new  land,  and  it  was  strengthened  by  his 
familiarity  with  the  English  poets  of  the  seven- 
teenth century.  In  the  works  of  Henry  Vaughan 
more  particularly  you  will  find  this  note  of 
expectation,  rising  at  times  to  a  cry  of  ecstasy 
for  which  there  is  no  equivalent  in  the  later 
American.  I  think  of  Vaughan  as  travelling 
his  quiet  rounds  in  his  Silurian  hills,  with  an 
eye  open  to  every  impression,  and  a  heart  like 
Thoreau' s  always  filled  with  the  waiting  won- 
der of  the  dawn.  If  his  mood  strikes  deeper 
than  Thoreau' s,  it  is  because,  coming  before  the 
romantic  worship  of  the  individual,  he  never  cut 
himself  off  from  the  Church  and  State,  but  moved 
in  the  greater  currents  of  tradition. 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  LONGFELLOW 

The  position  of  Longfellow  is  somewhat  curi- 
ous. He  was,  and  I  suppose  still  is,  the  most 
beloved  poet  of  the  past  century,  and  this  not 
only  among  the  ignorant  and  half-educated,  but 
among  people  of  the  finest  culture.  Men  as  dif- 
ferent in  temperament  as  Kipling  and  J.  H.  Short- 
house  give  credit  to  his  wonderful  knowledge  of 
the  sea,  and  to  Shorthouse,  at  least,  he  was  always 
"very  dear."  He  was  also  one  of  the  favourite 
poets  of  so  cunning  a  magician  in  words  as  Laf- 
cadio  Hearn  ;  and  to  such  names  one  might  add 
indefinitely.  Yet  it  remains  true  that  Longfellow 
has  never  been  quite  accepted  by  the  professed 
critics,  that  they  have  spoken  of  him  commonly 
with  reservation,  sometimes  even  with  contempt. 
Not  many,  indeed,  have  adopted  just  the  insolent 
tone  of  Mr.  Francis  Gribble,  to  whom  Longfellow 
was  merely  a  ' '  prig, ' '  with  no  characteristic  habit 
except  that  of  "decorating  his  person,"  a  "poet 
of  the  obvious  and  the  hum-drum,"  a  man 
' '  equally  devoid  of  humour  and  of  passion, ' ' 
whose  ' '  intellectual  outfit  .^pnsists  of  a  '  store  suit ' 
from  a  theological  emporium."  We  have  a  right 
to  be  incensed  at  the  tone  of  such  writing,  but, 
waiving  this,  we  must  still  acknowledge  that 
there  has  been  a  distinct  undercurrent  of  protest 

132 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     133 

against  the  poet's  easy  popularity.  Not  his  the 
feUcity  he  attributed  to  a  greater  name,  thinking, 
no  doubt,  of  the  cavilling  he  himself  endured 
even  during  his  life:  "O  happy  poet,  by  no 
critic  vext ! ' ' 

And  this  contrast  between  the  love  of  so  many 
readers  for  Longfellow  and  the  hesitation  of  his 
critics  is  perfectly  comprehensible.     The  critics 
are  mainly  right.     Let  us  not  blunt  or  pervert 
our  taste  by  ignoring  distinctions.     In  the  first 
place,  no  one  who  has  stored  his  mind  with  the 
work  of  the  great  poets  can  read  Longfellow  with- 
out stumbling  continually  over  reminiscences  that 
do  not  fall  exactly  under  the  head  of  plagiarism, 
but  that  have  the  eflfect  of  reducing  what  has  been 
nobly  and  individually  written  to  a  kind  of  smooth 
commonplace.     I  might  from  my  own  recollection 
fill  pages  with  these  dulled  echoes  of  a  finer 
music.     Let  me  illustrate  by   a  few  examples. 
Longfellow,  we  are  told  by  his  biographer,  wrote 
but  a  single  love  poem  (and  I,  for  one,  am  ready 
to  honour  him  for  this  reserve),  that  sonnet  to 
' '  My  morning  and  my  evening  star  of  love  !    My 
best  and   gentlest  lady!"     'Tis  a  pretty,  and, 
among  poets,  rare  compliment  to  his  wife  ;  but 
somehow  the  taste  of  it  grows  flat,  and  that  best 
and  gentlest  lady  drop§   to  something  resembling 
the  merely  respectable,  when  we  recall  the  most 
perfect    of     Greek     epigrams,     Plato's     LAarrjp 
Ttfhv  puiv  £ka}A7teg,  which  came  to  Longfellow, 
no  doubt,  through  Shelley's  version  : 


134  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Thou  wert  the  morning  star  among  the  living, 

Ere  thy  fair  light  had  fled  ; — 
Now,  having  died,  thou  art  as  Hesperus,  giving 

New  splendour  to  the  dead. 

It  is  not,  observe,  that  our  I^ongfellow  has  taken 
the  precise  thought  of  the  original ;  there  is  here 
no  charge  of  stealing.  It  is  rather  that  his  image 
suggests  the  same  image  used  differently  and 
more  poetically  by  another.  In  the  same  way  his 
complaint  beginning,  "Half  of  my  life  is  gone, 
and  I  have  let  The  years  slip  from  me, ' '  inevitably 
forces  a  comparison  with  Milton's  more  resonant 
note  :  ' '  When  I  consider  how  my  light  is  spent 
Ere  half  my  days." 
Again  I^ongfellow  writes : 

God  sent  his  Singers  upon  earth 
With  songs  of  sadness  and  of  mirth. 
That  they  might  touch  the  hearts  of  men, 
And  bring  them  back  to  heaven  again — 

and  we  remember  Keats  : 

Bards  of  Passion  and  of  Mirth, 
Ye  have  left  your  souls  on  earth  1 
Have  ye  souls  in  heaven,  too. 
Double-lived  in  regions  new  ? 

I^ongfellow  writes    of  the    unseen  dwellers   in 
Haunted  Houses: 

We  meet  them  at  the  doorway,  on  the  stair, 
Along  the  passages  they  come  and  go, 

Impalpable  impressions  on  the  air, 
A  sense  of  something  moving  to  and  fro — 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     135 

and  the  memory  goes  back  to  Thomas  Hood's 
lines  in  the  most  ghostly  of  English  poems  : 

Those  dreary  stairs,  where  with  the  sounding  stress 
Of  ev'ry  step  so  many  echoes  blended, 

The  mind,  with  dark  misgivings,  fear'd  to  guess 
How  many  feet  ascended. 


O'er  all  there  hung  the  shadow  of  a  fear, 

A  sense  of  mystery  the  spirit  daunted, 
And  said,  as  plain  as  whisper  in  the  ear, 

The  place  is  Haunted ! 

But  it  would  be  tedious  to  multiply  examples. 
The  point,  as  I  have  said,  is  not  that  Longfellow 
was  a  plagiarist  or  lacked  originality — greater 
poets  than  he  have  taken  their  own  where  they 
found  it  with  a  more  royally  predatory  hand — 
but  that  these  rather  vague  resemblances  of  lan- 
guage and  metaphor  so  often  draw  our  attention 
to  the  lower  plane  upon  which  his  imagination 
moves.  And  here  I  would  beg  for  a  little  indul- 
gence. This  distinction  between  the  higher  and 
lower  planes  of  the  imagination  goes  so  near  to 
the  very  roots  of  taste  and  criticism,  it  is  a  matter 
so  elusive  withal,  that  I  would  run  the  risk  of  an 
insistence  which  may  seem  like  the  proverbial 
breaking  of  a  butterfly  upon  a  wheel.  The  ques- 
tion turns  upon  that  dualism,  or  duplicity,  in  hu- 
man nature,  often  misunderstood  and  to-day  more 
often  ignored,  the  perception  of  which  does  yet  in 
some  way  mark  the  degree  of  a  poet's  or  a  philos- 
opher's initiation  into   the  mysteries  of  experi- 


136  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

ence.  To  make  the  point  clearer,  let  me  compare 
two  poems  which  are  known  by  heart  to  all, 
and  whose  efifect  can  be  tested  by  the  impressions 
of  memory.  One  is  I^ongfellow's  Weariness,  of 
which  I  will  quote  the  first  and  last  stanzas  : 

O  little  feet !  that  such  long  years 

Must  wander  on  through  hopes  and  fears, 

Must  ache  and  bleed  beneath  your  load  ; 
I,  nearer  to  the  wayside  inn 
Where  toil  shall  cease  and  rest  begin, 

Am  weary,  thinking  of  your  road  ! 


O  little  souls  !  as  pure  and  white 
And  crystalline  as  rays  of  light 

Direct  from  heaven,  their  source  divine ; 
Refracted  through  the  mist  of  years, 
How  red  my  setting  sun  appears, 

How  lurid  looks  this  soul  of  mine  ! 

The  other  is  Heine's  even  more  familiar  lyric  on 
a  somewhat  similar  theme  :  Du  bist  wie  eine 
Blume,  which  in  my  translation  will  at  least  be 
less  trite,  however  much  of  its  charm  may  have 
evaporated : 

So  fair  and  fresh  and  pure 

Even  as  a  flower  thou  art ; 
I  look  on  thee,  and  sadness 

Glideth  into  my  heart. 

'T  is  as  tho'  my  hands  were  resting 

Upon  thy  head  in  prayer, 
Asking  that  God  might  keep  thee 

So  pure  and  fresh  and  fair. 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     137 

Now,  both  of  these  poems  have  the  power  of 
touching  the  heart,  and  both  have  attained  the  no- 
ble distinction  of  living  in  the  mouths  of  men  ;  yet 
it  would  be  uncritical  to  say  that  the  impression 
from  them  is  quite  the  same,  or  that  their  reputa- 
tion is  quite  equal.  I  would  not  seem  to  be  in- 
sensible to  the  tenderness  of  Longfellow's  lines,  but 
something,  one  feels,  is  still  lacking  to  give  them 
that  penetrating,  clinging  appeal  which  belongs  to 
Heine's  even  simpler  song.  And  I  think  that,  if 
we  look  into  this  difference,  it  will  appear  to  de- 
pend most  of  all  upon  the  greater  and  lesser  depth 
of  that  sense  of  dualism  which  the  two  poets 
have  felt  and  put  into  language.  There  is  in 
Longfellow's  poem  the  contrast  of  innocent  child- 
hood and  old  age  wearied  of  the  world  ;  but  this 
contrast  springs  from  the  cumulative  effect,  so  to 
speak,  of  time,  the  refracting  mist  of  years,  and 
beyond  this  the  idea  scarcely  goes.  The  emotion 
conveyed  is  barely,  if  at  all,  distinguished  from 
the  sentimental  pathos  of  daily,  commonplace 
life.  Whereas  in  Heine  something  different  and, 
it  must  be  said,  higher,  enters.  It  is  not  easy,  as 
it  never  is  in  the  case  of  true  poetry,  to  define 
precisely  where  this  added  touch  comes  in — 
whether  in  the  imagery  of  the  prayer,  the  lin- 
gering cadence  of  the  repeated  epithets,  or  in 
some  haunting  vagueness  of  romantic  irony — 
but  one  instinctively  thinks  more  of  the  sym- 
bolical power  of  the  poem  than  of  any  personal 
incident  or  emotion  ;  and  this  contrast  between 


138  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  loveliness  of  youth  and  the  satiety  of  age 
becomes  a  sign  of  a  conflict  inherent  in  the 
poet's  own  heart,  nay,  if  you  will,  of  the  enig- 
matical dualism,  the  pathetic  or  terrible  sense 
of  transiency,  that  runs  through  the  heart  of 
the  world. 

Well,  let  us  accept  this  lower  position  for  the 
greater  part — but  not  for  all,  as  I  shall  attempt  to 
show — of  Longfellow's  poetry.  Let  us  admit  that 
his  peculiar  popularity  is  due  to  the  fact  that  he 
does  not  require  of  us  any  violent  readjustment 
of  our  ordinary  moods,  that  he  sets  our  own  daily 
thoughts  and  emotions  to  music.  Is  he  not  to  be 
prized,  and  praised,  for  this?  Like  Whittier, 
he  is  the  poet  of  the  hearth  and  the  home ;  yet 
with  a  difference.  It  is  in  accordance  with  the 
well-known  tricks  of  poetic  inspiration  that  the 
Quaker  poet,  who  was  never  married  and  in  his 
earlier  years  of  manhood  had  no  settled  abode, 
should  have  written  lovingly  of  the  peace  and  pro- 
tection of  the  home ;  whereas  Longfellow,  who 
knew  all  the  intimate  joys  of  the  family,  should 
have  dwelt  more  on  the  forebodings  and  memo- 
ries of  loss.  We  think  of  Whittier' s  Snow-Bound, 
with  its  snug  comforts  of  the  hearth  in  a  New 
England  winter,  or  of  his  Pennsylvayiia  Pilgrim, 
that  blandest  of  pastoral  poems ;  even  his  fancies 
of  the  future  life  took  on  this  ideal  of  the  home, 
as  I  have  pointed  out  in  another  essay.  But 
these  are  not  the  notes  of  Longfellow.  He, 
rather,  in  a  hundred  various  keys  sings  of  the 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     139 

parting  of  friends ;  of  resignation  for  the  "  one 
vacant  chair  " — 

The  air  is  fall  of  farewells  to  the  dying, 
And  mournings  for  the  dead  ; 

of  the  cry  of  David  in  the  Chamber  over  the  Gate 
for  Absalom  his  son.  Even  in  his  child  poems 
there  often  lurks  a  shadow  of  anxiety: 

I  said  unto  myself,  if  I  were  dead, 
"What  would  befall  these  children  ?  what  would  be 
Their  fate,  who  now  are  looking  up  to  me 
For  help  and  furtherance  ?     Their  lives,  I  said. 

Would  be  a  volume  wherein  I  have  read 
But  the  first  chapters,  and  no  longer  see 
To  read  the  rest  of  their  dear  history, 
So  full  of  beauty  and  so  full  of  dread. 

It  is  the  treatment  of  these,  and  other  such 
themes  as  these,  that  has  made  him  the  one  poet 
whom  you  will  find  in  almost  ever>''  household, 
the  poet  who  is  really  read  and  enjoyed  by  the 
people;  for  it  is  just  this  sentiment  of  facile  pathos 
that  marks  the  true  popularity.  And  here,  also, 
we  discover  his  relation  to  the  Teutonising  and 
romanticising — if  the  word  may  be  passed — of 
New  England  culture.  From  sources  of  German 
metaphysics,  whether  directly  or  indirectly,  from 
Fichte  and  Schelling  and  Schleierraacher,  Emer- 
son brought  in  his  transcendental  philosophy  ; 
from  the  same  romantic  school  came  the  impulse 
that  strengthened  Hawthorne  in  his  love  of  the 
weird  and  the  subterranean,  as  also  his  aggravated 
sense  of  solitude  in  the  world  ;  there  Thoreau  got 


I40  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

his  mystic  nature  cult — always,  it  need  not  be 
added,  with  diflFerences  caused  by  other  surround- 
ings and  traditions.  I^ongfellow  brought  from 
Germany  the  ideal  of  a  world  literature  which 
should  absorb  the  best  of  all  lands ;  but  more 
than  that,  he  imported  into  Cambridge  the  senti- 
mental note  that  runs  through  German  letters. 
He  gave  to  our  poetry  the  romantic  Evipfind- 
samkeit,  refined  and  qualified  indeed  by  the  purity 
and  sweetness  and  strength  of  his  own  nature. 

For  there  is  about  his  muse,  I  know  not  what, 
a  certain  gracious  sweetness,  which  has  the 
power,  as  was  said  when  he  received  his  degree 
at  Cambridge,  England,  "  to  solace  the  ills  of  life 
and  draw  men  from  its  low  cares  ad  excelsiora  " — 
an  allusion  which  was  caught  and  applauded  by 
the  captious  undergraduates.  One  might  analyse 
the  elements  of  this  charm  in  part,  if  it  were  pro- 
fitable. He  had  in  the  first  place  the  rare  gift  of 
rhythm  ;  his  lines  sing  themselves  inevitably,  and 
there  is  never,  except  in  some  of  his  hexameters 
and  his  blank  verse,  any  doubt  about  the  cadence, 
or  any  feeling  that  the  cadence  does  not  fit  the 
thought.  lyOwell  was  thinking  of  this  easy 
rhythmical  quality  when  he  wrote  of  Longfellow 
on  his  sixtieth  birthday: 

I  need  not  praise  the  sweetness  of  his  song, 

Where  limpid  verse  to  limpid  verse  succeeds 
Smooth  as  our  Charles,  -when,  fearing  lest  he  wrong 
The  new  moon's  mirrored  skiff,  he  glides  along. 
Full  without  noise,  and  whispers  in  his  reeds. 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW      141 

And  then  Longfellow  has  the  second,  and  still 
rarer,  gift  of  interest,  the  power  of  catching  the 
reader's  attention  with  the  first  word  and  hold- 
ing it  to  the  end.  Personally  I  am  not  particu- 
larly fond  of  Eva7igelme  and  the  other  longer 
poems,  with  the  exception  of  some  of  the  Talcs  of 
a  Wayside  hin  and  The  Golden  Legend ;  I  think 
his  virtue  lies  elsewhere.  But  all,  or  nearly  all 
of  them  have  at  least  the  trick  of  arousing  interest. 
So  the  fancy  is  stirred  by  those  first  words  of 
Evangeline,  "This  is  the  forest  primeval,"  and 
kept  awake  by  the  shifting  scenes  of  nature 
and  the  sentimental  appeal  until  the  very  close: 

While  from  its  rocky  caverns  the  deep-voiced  neighbour- 
ing ocean 

Speaks,  and  in  accents  disconsolate  answers  the  wail  of 
the  forest. 

(Hexameters,  by  the  way,  as  sonorous  and  rhyth- 
mical as  any  in  the  language.)  Not  all  the  great 
poets  have  this  gift  of  interest ;  it  is  not  conspicu- 
ous in  Milton  or  Virgil  or  Wordsworth ;  it  even 
goes  at  times  with  very  inferior  qualities  :  but  al- 
ways it  is  an  immense  aid  in  enforcing  whatever 
other  powers  a  writer  may  possess.  It  would  not 
be  easy  to  say  in  just  what  this  faculty  of  interest 
resides.  In  Longfellow  it,  perhaps,  depends 
mainly  on  his  power  of  making  the  reader  feel  at 
once  that  here  are  his  own  ideas,  almost  his  own 
language.  Nor  are  the  artifices  of  rhetoric  want- 
ing.    Especially,  like  Lowell,  our  poet  had  a 


142 


SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 


wonderful  gift  of  metaphor.  You  would  be  sur- 
prised if  you  went  through  Longfellow  and 
marked  the  copiousness,  the  varietj^,  and  the  in- 
genuity of  these  figures.  Even  from  memory  one 
might  bring  together  a  long  list  of  metaphors  and 
similes  transforming  a  single  group  of  appear- 
ances, such,  for  example,  as  the  phenomena  of 
night.  One  might  begin  with  the  first  words  of 
the  poem  that  follows  the  prelude  of  his  first 
volume  of  collected  verse  : 

I  heard  the  trailing  garments  of  the  Night 
Sweep  through  her  marble  halls. 

How  miraculously  that  too  familiar  image  ex- 
presses the  gradual  hushing  of  the  earth  as  twi- 
light descends  !  Or,  to  pass  fi-om  sound  to  vision, 
there  is  the  even  better  known  stanza  : 

.  .  .  and  the  darkness 
Falls  from  the  wings  of  Night, 
As  a  feather  is  wafted  downward 
From  an  eagle  in  his  flight. 

Less  subtle  and  less  familiar  are  a  dozen  other 
metaphors  of  the  night  that  might  be  quoted, 
such  as  the  lines  in  Hiawatha  : 

Where  into  the  empty  spaces 
Sinks  the  sun,  as  the  flamingo 
Drops  into  her  nest  at  nightfall 
In  the  melancholy  marshes  ; — 

or  this  more  trivial  comparison  : 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     1 43 

In  hrond  daylight,  and  at  noon, 
Yesterday  I  saw  the  moon 
Sailing  high,  but  faint  and  white, 
As  a  schoolboy's  paper  kite  ; — 

or  this  more  aerial  fancy  : 

As  a  pale  phantom  with  a  lamp 
Ascends  some  ruin's  haunted  stair, 

So  glides  the  moon  along  the  damp 
Mysterious  chambers  of  the  air. 

These  are  but  a  few  of  the  metaphors  I  might 
from  my  own  memory  bring  together  on  a  single 
theme.  Most  wonderful  of  all,  perhaps,  is  that 
comparison  whose  beauty  has  grown  dim  to  us 
through  too  much  repetition  : 

And  the  cares,  that  infest  the  day, 
Shall  fold  their  tents,  like  the  Arabs, 
And  as  silently  steal  away. 

(And  here  again  his  art  is  helped  by  his  delicate 
rhythmical  sense.  As  an  example  of  the  force  of 
little  things,  let  the  stanza  be  read  without  the 
word  "as"  in  the  last  line,  and  see  how  flat  it 
seems  in  comparison.) 

Now  metaphors,  I  know,  are  a  dangerous  rhe- 
torical weapon,  and  as  a  rule  they  are  used  with 
extreme  parsimony  by  the  greatest  poets  ;  you 
will  find  a  score  of  them  in  L,ongfellow  to  one  in 
Milton.  Their  tendency  is  to  substitute  the  di- 
version of  fancy  for  the  more  tenacious  vision  of 
the  imagination  ;  they  distract  the  mind  ordina- 


144  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

rily  from  its  intense  preoccupation  and  so  lessen, 
while  diversifying,  our  intellectual  emotion.  But 
they  are  peculiarly  appropriate  to  such  a  talent  as 
Longfellow's,  as  they  are  to  lyO well's,  and  to 
them  is  largely  due  the  continuance  and  ease  of 
the  reader's  interest.  And  apparently  they  flowed 
into  Longfellew's  mind  quite  unbidden.  There 
is  in  his  published  verse  nothing  better  in  its  way 
than  this  simile  jotted  down  in  his  diary  January 
29th,  1849  : 

Another  of  Btnersoa's  wonderful  lectures.  The  sub- 
ject Inspiration  ;  the  lecture  itself  an  illustration  of  the 
theme.  Emerson  is  like  a  beautiful  portico,  in  a  lovely 
scene  of  nature.  We  stand  expectant,  waiting  for  the 
High  Priest  to  come  forth  ;  and  lo,  there  comes  a  gentle 
wind  from  the  portal,  swelling  and  subsiding ;  and  the 
blossoms  and  the  vine  leaves  shake,  and  far  away  down 
the  green  fields  the  grasses  bend  and  wave  ;  and  we  ask, 
"  When  will  the  High  Priest  come  forth  and  reveal  to  us 
the  truth?"  and  the  disciples  say,  "He  has  already  gone 
forth,  and  is  yonder  in  the  meadows."  "  And  the  truth 
he  was  to  reveal?"     "  It  is  Nature  ;  nothing  more." 

These  are  the  qualities  of  thought  and  manner 
that  have  at  once  made  Longfellow  the  most  be- 
loved of  poets  and  kept  him  from  full  acceptance 
among  the  critical.  But  there  is  still  another 
aspect  of  his  work,  which  is  sometimes  over- 
looked. The  weakness  in  his  genius,  as  in  that 
of  the  New  England  school  generally  to  which  he 
belonged,  was  an  absence  of  resistance.  There  is 
a  significant  entry  in  his  diary,  under  the  date 
March  22,  1848  :     "He  [Lowell]  says  he  means 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     145 

never  to  write  any  more  poetry — at  least  for  many 
years  ;  he  '  cannot  write  slowly  enough.'  "  One 
feels  this  lack  of  the  inward  check  in  much  of 
lyongfellow  ;  the  lines  flow  from  him  too  smoothly 
and  fluently  ;  they  have  not  been  held  back  long 
enough  to  be  steeped  in  the  deeper  and  more  ob- 
stinate emotions  of  the  breast — 

Fi,  du  rhythme  commode, 
Comme  un  Soulier  trop  grand. 

When  the  proper  resistance  came  to  him,  it  was 
commonly  the  result  of  some  check  imposed  by 
the  difficulties  of  form,  rather  than  of  his  own 
artistic  inhibition.  Thus  of  all  his  poems,  the 
dramas  in  blank  verse  are  about  the  flattest,  and  in 
general  his  power  increases  with  the  intricacy  of 
the  rhymes  employed.  The  rule  is,  of  course, 
not  without  exceptions.  To  some  readers  the 
easy  flow  of  the  trochees  in  Hiawatha  has  the 
charm  of  a  singing  brook  that  bubbles  over  its 
pebbles  all  a  summer's  day.  And  occasionally  in 
those  free  quatrains,  whose  secret  he  learned 
from  Heine,  and  which  seem  so  easy,  but  are 
really  so  difficult,  he  strikes  a  note  that  is  rare 
enough  in  English.  So,  one  sleepless  night,  he 
makes  this  entry  in  his  diary  :  "  Nahant,  Septem- 
ber 8,  1880,  four  o'clock  in  the  morning,  "  and 
then  turns  the  memorandum  into  verse  : 

Four  by  the  clock  !  and  yet  not  day  ; 
But  the  great  world  rolls  and  wheels  away, 
With  its  cities  on  land  and  ships  at  sea, 
Into  the  dawn  that  is  to  be  ! 
xo 


146  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Only  the  lamp  in  the  anchored  bark 
Sends  its  glimmer  across  the  dark, 
And  the  heavy  breathing  of  the  sea 
Is  the  only  sound  that  comes  to  me. 

When  reading  these  lines,  it  is  easy  to  understand 
why  Kipling  reckoned  Longfellow  among  the  few 
poets  who  really  knew  the  sea.  No  one  who  has 
spent  much  of  his  time  on  some  quiet  harbour  of 
our  Atlantic  coast  can  fail  to  be  struck  by  the 
magic  evocation  of  that  second  stanza — the  night- 
bound  shore,  the  single  light  low  on  the  water, 
the  sleepy  wash  of  the  waves.  Or,  take  this 
stanza  from  the  poem  of  meditations  before  the 
flames  of  a  driftwood  fire : 

And,  as  their  splendour  flashed  and  failed. 
We  thought  of  wrecks  upon  the  main, 

Of  ships  dismasted,  that  were  hailed 
And  sent  no  answer  back  again. 

Has  ever  any  poet,  in  a  few  quiet  words,  expressed 
more  perfectly  the  awe  and  mystery  of  the  sea,  the 
sense  of  that  vastness  where  so  much  may  happen 
unseen  and  unknown  of  the  world  ? 

Such  triumphs  Longfellow  wins  now  and  then 
in  the  least  resistant  metres,  but  his  greater  work, 
that  on  which  his  artistic  fame  will  depend,  is  in 
the  more  elaborate  forms,  particularly  in  the  son- 
net. Professor  C.  E.  Norton,  who  speaks  of  lyong- 
fellow  with  the  authority  of  a  friend  and  a  critic, 
has  just  published  a  sketch  of  Longfellow's  life, 
with  a  selection  of  his  autobiographic  poems.      It 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     147 

is  an  excellent  book  for  the  occasion,  but  one 
could  wish  that  he  had,  instead,  brought  together 
all  the  sonnets,  with  a  study  of  Longfellow  as  an 
artist.'  For  ripeness  of  style  and  imagery  such  a 
volume  would  stand  easily  at  the  head  of  Ameri- 
can poetry,  and  it  would  show  an  aspect  of  Long- 
fellow's genius  which  is  obscured  by  the  bulk  of 
his  more  popular  work.  It  would  place  him  as  a 
peer  among  the  great  sonnet  writers  of  England. 
We  should  have  but  a  slender  volume— there  are 
altogether  only  sixty-three  of  the  original  sonnets 
—but  of  what  richness  and  variety  of  scope  ! 
Here  in  brief  compass  are  all  the  interests  of  his 
life.  His  long  acquaintance  with  books  speaks 
in  those  six  magnificent  sonnets  prefixed  to  the 
translation  of  The  Divine  Comedy,  and  in  the 
separate  sonnets  on  Dante,  and  Milton,  and 
Keats.  Was  ever  poet  more  happily  celebrated 
than  Chaucer  in  these  lines? 

An  old  man  in  a  lodge  within  a  park  ; 
The  chamber  walls  depicted  all  around 
With  portraitures  of  huntsman,  hawk,  and  hound, 
And  the  hurt  deer.     He  listeueth  to  the  lark, 

Whose  song  comes  with  the  sunshine  through  the  dark 
Of  painted  glass  in  leaden  lattice  bound  ; 
He  listeneth  and  he  laugheth  at  the  sound, 
Then  writeth  in  a  book  like  any  clerk. 


I  Since  this  was  written  the  sonnets  have  been  edited 
by  Ferris  Greenslet  and  issued  separately.  Houghton, 
Mifflin,  &  Co.,  1907. 


148  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

He  is  the  poet  of  the  dawn,  who  wrote 
The  Canterbury  Tales,  and  his  old  age 
Made  beautiful  with  song  ;  and  as  I  read 
I  hear  the  crowing  cock,  I  hear  the  note 
Of  lark  and  linnet,  and  from  every  page 
Rise  odours  of  ploughed  field  or  flowery  mead. 

And  then  by  the  side  of  this  set  the  contrasted 
picture  of  Shakespeare's  stage  : 

A  vision  as  of  crowded  city  streets, 
With  human  life  in  endless  overflow  ; 
Thunder  of  thoroughfares  ;  trumpets  that  blow 
To  battle  ;  clamour,  in  obscure  retreats. 

Of  sailors  landed  from  their  anchored  fleets  ; 
Tolling  of  bells  in  turrets,  and  below 
Voices  of  children,  and  bright  flowers  that  throw 
O'er  garden  walls  their  intermingled  sweets  ! 

To  write  like  this  is  to  combine  at  once  the  func- 
tion of  the  critic  and  the  poet.  Wordsworth  may- 
have  surpassed  him,  but  no  other,  I  think,  in  this 
use  of  the  sonnet . 

But  the  literary  flavour  in  this  little  book  of 
ours  would  be  no  stronger  than  the  other  interests 
we  associate  with  him.  Here  in  the  sonnets  to 
Agassiz  and  Felton  and  Sumner,  the  friendships 
that  made  so  large  a  part  of  his  life  would  find 
expression ;  his  tender  solicitude  for  children 
speaks  in  A  Shadow  and  To- Morrow ;  his  love  of 
nature  and  the  sea  finds  here  its  full  utterance; 
his  reserved,  yet  earnest,  part  in  the  Abolition 
movement  and  the  war  gives  pathetic  dignity  to 
A  Nameless  Grave,  which  Mr.  Howells  has  signal- 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     149 

ised  for  its  perfect  grace  and  ease ;  his  reminis- 
cences of  travel,  which  did  so  much  to  overcome 
American  provincialism,  give  colour  to  Venice, 
The  River  Rhone,  and  half  a  dozen  others  ;  the  sad 
fortitude  of  his  old  age,  as  all  old  age  is  sad, 
breathes  in  this  last  sonnet  he  was  to  write,  his 
farewell  inscribed  to  My  Books  : 

Sadly,  as  some  old  mediceval  knight 

Gazed  at  the  arms  he  could  no  longer  wield, 
The  sword  two-handed  and  the  shining  shield 
Suspended  in  the  hall,  and  full  in  sight, 

While  secret  longings  for  the  lost  delight 
Of  tourney  or  adventure  in  the  field 
Came  over  him,  and  tears  but  half-concealed 
Trembled  and  fell  upon  his  beard  of  white, 

So  I  behold  these  books  upon  their  shelf, 
My  ornaments  and  arms  of  other  days  ; 

Not  wholly  useless,  though  no  longer  used, 

For  they  remind  me  of  my  former  self, 

Younger  and  stronger,  and  the  pleasant  ways 
In  which  I  walked,  now  clouded  and  confused. 

These  are  but  glimpses  of  the  riches  in  little 
room  that  a  book  of  lyOngfellow's  sonnets  would 
offer.  They  would  set  forth  to  unbelievers 
an  artist  of  rare  tact  and  power,  and  they  would 
be  the  best  commemoration  of  the  sweetest  char- 
acter that  ever  revealed  itself  in  rhymes.  I  know 
that  some  have  professed  to  find  a  certain 
solemn  self-complacency  in  Longfellow.  They 
turn  to  the  selections  from  his  diary  in  the  Life 
published  by  his  brother,  and  point  with  a  kind  of 
patronising  smile  at  such  an  entry  as  this  : 


l5o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

December  6.  [1838.  He  was  then  in  his  thirty-second 
year.]  A  beautiful  holy  morning  within  me.  I  was 
softly  excited,  I  knew  not  why  ;  and  wrote  with  peace  in 
my  heart  and  not  without  tears  in  my  eyes,  The  Reaper 
and  the  Flowers,  a  Psalm  of  Death. 

This  man  takes  himself  too  seriously,  they  say ; 
he  has  no  humour.  And  what  then?  Why, 
most  of  the  great  poets  of  the  world  were  without 
humour,  and  have  they  been  any  the  less  ac- 
cepted for  that?  Humour  is  well  in  its  place, 
but  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  make  a 
fetich  of  it,  as  most  of  us  do  in  these  days.  And 
as  for  taking  his  moods  and  inspiration  over- 
seriously,  there  is  nothing  in  Longfellow's  diary 
that  in  any  way  approaches  the  stupendous  so- 
lemnity of  Wordsworth's  introductory  notes  to 
his  own  poems.  But  the  best  refutation  of  such 
churlish  criticism  is  in  the  poems  of  Longfellow, 
especially  those  in  the  sonnet  form,  which  from 
the  time  of  Petrarch,  and  of  Shakespeare  in 
English,  has  been  the  chosen  vehicle  for  poetic 
confession. 

Turn  again  to  that  desired  book  of  sonnets  if 
you  wish  to  see  the  mellow  sweetness  and  the 
strength  of  Longfellow's  character.  I  have  al- 
ready referred  to  his  single  love-poem,  the  sonnet 
to  "  My  morning  and  my  evening  star,"  which, 
like  most  of  such  effusions  to  a  man's  wife,  rings 
rather  flat ;  but  not  so  that  other  sonnet  of  com- 
memoration. The  story  of  the  second  Mrs.  Long- 
fellow's terrible  death  by  fire  and  of  her  husband's 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     151 

efiforts  to  save  her  is  too  well  known  to  bear  re- 
peating, as  may  seem  also  the  lines  which  he 
wrote  eighteen  years  afterwards,  and  which  were 
found  in  his  portfolio,  unpublished,  after  his  own 
death : 

In  the  long,  sleepless  watches  of  the  night, 
A  gentle  face — the  face  of  one  long  dead — 
Looks  at  me  from  the  wall,  where  round  its  head 
The  night-lamp  casts  a  halo  of  pale  light. 

Here  in  this  room  she  died  ;  and  soul  more  white 
Never  through  martyrdom  of  fire  was  led 
To  its  repose  ;  nor  can  in  books  be  read 
The  legend  of  a  life  more  benedight. 

There  is  a  mountain  in  the  distant  West 
That,  sun-defying,  in  its  deep  ravines 
Displays  a  cross  of  snow  upon  its  side. 

Such  is  the  cross  I  wear  upon  my  breast 

These  eighteen  years,  through  all  the  changing  scenes 
And  seasons,  changeless  since  the  day  she  died. 

I  think  we  need  have  no  fear  of  the  slurs  of  shal- 
lowness and  foppery  cast  upon  a  man  who  carried 
his  suffering  so  deep  in  his  heart  that  the  world 
was  unaware  of  its  existence.  And  it  is  pleasant 
to  hear  that  the  woman  so  honoured  was  worthy 
to  be  a  poet's  wife.  She  is  described  as  having 
"great  beauty,  and  a  presence  of  dignity  and 
distinction,  the  true  image  of  a  beautiful  nature." 
Everybody  knows  the  home  over  which  she  pre- 
sided, the  Craigie  House,  in  Cambridge,  that 
looks  out  from  Brattle  Street  over  what  is  now 
a  park,  named  after  the  poet,  to  the  river  Charles, 


152  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

celebrated  by  him  in  so  many  songs.  It  had 
been  Washington's  headquarters  when  he  was 
in  command  of  the  army  about  Boston,  and 
lyongfellow  felt  the  ghostly  presence  of  his  great 
predecessor : 

Once,  ah,  once,  within  these  walls, 
One  whom  memory  oft  recalls, 
The  Father  of  his  Country,  dwelt, 
And  yonder  meadows  broad  and  damp 
The  fires  of  the  besieging  camp 
Encircled  with  a  burning  belt. 
Up  and  down  these  echoing  stairs. 
Sounded  his  majestic  tread  ; 
Yes,  within  this  very  room 
Sat  he  in  those  hours  of  gloom, 
Weary  both  in  heart  and  head. 

But  there  were  other  memories  attached  to  the 
old  mansion,  which  lyongfellow  did  not  put  into 
verse.  The  lady  who  owned  the  house  and  with 
whom  Longfellow  lodged  before  it  came  into  his 
own  possession,  was  a  personage  that  caused  a 
good  deal  of  wonder  and  some  consternation 
among  the  pious  folk  of  Cambridge.  There 
are  probably  people  still  living  who  can  recall 
her  figure  as  she  sat  at  the  window  reading — 
reading  that  arch-mocker,  Voltaire,  in  the  original 
French,  it  was  believed.  One  of  the  legends  about 
her  is  to  the  effect  that  she  sturdily  refused  to 
allow  the  caterpillars  on  her  elm -trees  to  be 
burned.  ' '  Leave  them  alone  ! ' '  she  would  cry ; 
' '  what  are  we  ourselves  but  miserable  worms ! ' ' — 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     153 

which  would  seem  to  be  as  much  scriptural  as 
Voltairian. 

Here  Longfellow  lived  a  large  and  bountiful 
life,  befitting  one  to  whom  fame  and  honour  and 
prosperity  came  hand  in  hand,  neither  reluctantly 
nor  singly.  It  is  mainly  in  recognition  of  his 
character  as  a  man  and  poet  that  his  centenary 
has  been  turned  all  over  the  country  into  a  kind 
Qi  agape ;  but  it  is  partly  also  because,  even  bet- 
ter than  lyowell,  he  represents  a  beautiful  society 
now  passed  away  and  almost  forgotten.  I  was 
interested  the  other  day  in  looking  through  a 
pamphlet  just  published,  which  contains  the  pro- 
ceedings of  the  Cambridge  Historical  Society — 
an  association  of  gentlemen  and  ladies  formed  a 
couple  of  years  ago  to  gather  and  preserve  local 
traditions.  The  papers  are  filled  with  memories 
of  the  little  college  town  to  which  Longfellow 
came  as  a  young  teacher,  steeped  in  the  literatures 
of  Europe.  It  would  be  pleasant  to  quote  at 
length  from  the  recollections  of  Colonel  Higgin- 
son  and  Professor  Norton  ;  they  give  almost  a 
better  picture  of  the  quaint  life  of  the  day  than 
Lowell's  essay  on  Cambridge  Thirty  Years  Ago. 
Says  Professor  Norton  in  his  opening  address  : 

So  great  are  the  changes  in  the  town  since  my  child- 
hood that  the  aspects  and  conditions  of  those  days  seem 
more  than  a  lifetime  away.  I  have  the  happiness  of 
passing  my  old  age  in  the  house  in  which  I  was  bom. 
It  has  always  been  my  home  ;  but  when  I  was  a  boy,  it 
was  in  the  country — now  it  is  suburban  and  in  the  heart 


154 


SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 


of  a  city.  Kirkland  Street  was  a  country  road  with  not 
a  single  house  on  its  southern  side,  but  with  a  wide 
stretch  quite  over  to  Harvard  Street  of  marsh  land  and 
huckleberry  pasture,  with  channels  running  through  the 
thick  growth  of  shrubs,  often  frozen  in  the  winter,  and 
on  which  we  boys  used  to  skate  over  the  very  site  of  the 
building  in  which  we  have  met  to-night.  Down  as  far 
as  to  Inman  Square,  the  region  was  solitary,  while  beyond 
Inman  Square,  toward  Boston,  was  an  extensive  wood  of 
pines  with  a  dense  underbrush,  the  haunt,  as  we  boys 
used  to  believe,  of  gamblers  and  other  bad  characters 
from  the  neighbouring  city,  and  to  be  swiftly  hurried  by 
if  nightfall  caught  us  near  it.  The  whole  region  round 
my  father's  house  was,  indeed,  so  thinly  settled  that  it 
preserved  its  original  rural  character.  It  was  rich  in 
wild  growth,  and  well  known  to  botanists  as  the  habitat 
of  many  rare  wild  flowers  ;  the  marshes  were  fragrant  in 
spring  with  azalea  and  the  clethra  ;  and  through  spring, 
summer,  and  autumn  there  was  a  profuse  procession  of 
the  familiar  flowers  of  New  England.  It  was  a  favourite 
resort  of  birds,  but  there  is  now  little  left  of  it  fit  for  their 
homes,  though  many  of  them  still  revisit  in  their  migra- 
tions the  noisy  locality  where  their  predecessors  enjoyed 
a  peaceful  and  retired  abode. 

But  even  a  greater  change  than  that  from  country  vil- 
lage to  suburban  town  has  taken  place  here  in  Old 
Cambridge  in  the  last  seventy  years.  The  people  have 
changed.  In  my  boyhood  the  population  was  practically 
all  of  New  England  origin,  and  in  large  proportion  Cam- 
bridge-born, and  inheritors  of  Old  Cambridge  traditions. 
The  fruitful  invasion  of  barbarians  had  not  begun.  The 
foreign-born  people  could  be  counted  upon  the  fingers. 
There  was  Rule,  the  excellent  Scotch  gardener,  who  was 
not  without  points  of  resemblance  to  Andrew  Fairservice  ; 
there  was  Sweetman,  the  one  Irish  day  labourer,  faithful 
and  intelligent,  trained  as  a  boy  in  one  of  the  "hedge- 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     1 55 

schools  "  of  his  native  Ireland,  and  ready  to  lean  on  his 
spade  and  put  the  troublesome  schoolboy  to  a  test  on  the 
Odes  of  Horace,  or  even  on  the  Anna  viriimque  cano ; 
and  at  the  heart  of  the  village  was  the  hair-cutter,  Marcus 
Reaniie,  from  some  unknown  foreign  land,  with  his  shop 
full,  in  a  boy's  eyes,  of  treasures,  some  of  his  own  col- 
lecting, some  of  them  brought  from  distant  romantic 
parts  of  the  world  by  his  sailor  son.  There  were  doubt- 
less other  foreigners,  but  I  do  not  recall  them,  except  a 
few  teachers  of  languages  in  the  College,  of  whom  three 
filled  in  these  and  later  years  an  important  place  in  the 
life  of  the  town — Dr.  Beck,  Dr.  Follen,  and  Mr.  Sales. 
But  the  intermixture  of  foreign  elements  was  so  small  as 
not  to  affect  the  character  of  the  town  ;  in  fact,  every- 
body knew  not  only  everybody  else  in  person,  but  also 
much  of  everybody's  tradition,  connections,  and  mode  of 
life.  It  has  been  a  pathetic  experience  for  me  to  live  all 
my  life  in  one  community  and  to  find  myself  gradually 
becoming  a  stranger  to  it. 

And  what  society  was  gathered  together  in  this 
village  among  the  fields  and  fens  !  Read  the 
poems  written  by  Longfellow  on  the  death  of  his 
friends — on  Hawthorne,  Dana,  Sumner,  Agassiz, 
Felton,  and  I  know  not  how  many  others.  Or, 
which  of  our  cities  to-day  can  show  any  gather- 
ing of  men  equal  to  the  weekly  meetings  of 
lyongfellow  and  Lowell  and  Professor  Norton  to 
discuss  the  translation  of  Dante  ?  We  may,  if  we 
choose,  look  back  upon  that  life  as  in  many  ways 
provincial ;  but  how  much  of  the  strain  and  in- 
consequence of  our  would-be  cosmopolitan  society 
it  lacked.  One  need  not  be  a  New  Englander, 
or  a  Harvard  man,  to  join  heartily  in  honouring 


156  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

the  poet  who  represents  the  highest  and  most 
homogeneous  culture  this  country  has  yet 
produced. 

And  it  is  wholesome  for  us  to  read  and  praise 
Longfellow.  It  is  not  necessary  to  place  his  work 
as  a  whole  beside  that  of  the  greatest  poet,  or 
to  overlook  his  shortcomings  ;  but  I  think  even 
those  shortcomings  have  their  special  value  at 
the  present  hour.  We  are  apt  to  take  our  poets 
rather  solemnly,  when  we  read  them  at  all,  to 
search  for  deep  and  complex  meanings  ;  and  in 
the  process  we  often  lose  the  inward  serenity  and 
unvexed  faith  which  it  is  the  mission  of  the  poet 
to  bestow.  Not  the  stress  of  our  emotion  or  our 
intellectual  perturbation  is  the  measure  of  our  un- 
derstanding, but  rather  the  depth  of  our  response 
to  that  word  of  the  exiled  Dante,  when,  in  the 
convent  court,  he  was  questioned  as  to  what  he 
sought — La  pace,  peace.  And  Longfellow  knew 
the  meaning  of  that  word  as  Dante  used  it.  In 
the  sorrow  that  fell  upon  him  after  his  tragic  be- 
reavement, he  found  solace,  or  at  least  strength, 
in  the  daily  translation  of  The  Divine  Comedy. 
Every  lover  of  poetry  knows  the  first  and  finest 
of  the  sonnets  he  prefixed  to  that  work  : 

Oft  have  I  seen  at  some  cathedral  door 
A  labourer,  pausing  in  the  dust  and  heat. 
Lay  down  his  burden,  and  with  reverent  feet 

Enter,  and  cross  himself,  and  on  the  floor 
Kneel  to  repeat  his  paternoster  o'er  ; 
Far  off  the  noises  of  the  world  retreat : 


THE    CENTENARY    OF    LONGFELLOW     157 

The  loud  vociferations  of  the  street 

Become  an  undistiugnishable  roar. 
So,  as  I  enter  here  from  day  to  day, 

And  leave  my  burden  at  this  minster  gate, 
Kneeling  in  prayer,  and  not  ashamed  to  pra^-, 

The  tumult  of  the  time  disconsolate 
To  inarticulate  murmurs  dies  away. 

While  the  eternal  ages  watch  and  wait. 

We  need  have  no  fear  of  paying  homage  to  a 
poet  who  wrote  such  hnes  as  those.  And  he 
himself,  if  he  did  not,  Hke  Dante  and  his  peers, 
build  at  the  great  cathedral  of  song,  did  at  least 
add  to  it  a  fair  and  homely  chapel,  where  also,  to 
one  who  comes  humbly  and  reverently,  the  eter- 
nal ages  watch  and  wait. 


DONALD  G.  MITCHELI. 

There  was  a  time  not  so  long  ago  when  the 
Reveries  of  a  Bachelor,  and  perhaps  Dream- Life , 
stood  on  the  shelf  of  every  college  sophomore,  the 
gift  of  some  gentle  friend,  'Twas  a  pretty  cus- 
tom, as  if  the  donor  with  furtive  fingers  were 
knocking  for  admission  into  these  mysterious 
masculine  quarters,  and  would  hint  with  sly 
bashfulness  that  a  young  bachelor's  idle  thoughts 
should  properly  turn  to  matrimony.  Well,  the 
sophomore  and  his  maid,  I  am  told,  have  grown 
a  little  ashamed  of  this  peculiar  form  of  senti- 
mentality; yet  the  writer  of  the  Reveries  may 
take  confidence  in  denying,  as  he  did  in  a  recent 
Preface  to  his  book,  "that  the  boisterous  and 
vscathing  and  rollicking  humour  of  our  time  has 
blown  all  of  pathos  and  all  of  the  more  delicate 
human  sympathies  into  limbo."  I  do  not  know 
certainly  what  author  now  acts  as  go-between  for 
the  tender  approximations  of  youth — Dr.  Henry 
van  Dyke,  I  dare  say,  or  some  other  licensed 
caterer  virginibus  puerisque;  the  fashion  of  taste 
changes,  and  old  favourites  pass  away,  but  there 
remains  the  audience,  ' '  for  ever  panting  and  for 
ever  young." 

The  real  danger  is  that  the  name  of  "  Ik  Mar- 

158 


DONALD    G.    MITCHELL  1 59 

vel,"  the  dreamer,  should  quite  eclipse  the  more 
substantial  author,  who,  as  he  says  rather  plain- 
tively, has  ' '  written  very  much  better  books, 
every  way,  since  that  time,"  though  the  world 
of  book-buyers  will  not  hear  it.  Perhaps  the 
handsome  new  edition  of  his  works '  will  bring 
that  fickle  world  to  its  senses.  I  hope  so,  for  Mr. 
Mitchell  represents  that  rare  figure  in  American 
letters,  the  gentleman  amateur,  whom  it  is  good 
to  honour.  Yet  it  must  be  confessed  that  a  full 
half  of  his  volumes  are  but  tenuous  things  to 
stand  against  the  trade-winds  of  oblivion.  One 
cannot  feel  easy,  for  instance,  about  those  six 
volumes  of  light  talk  on  English  and  American 
literature.  One  might  recommend  them  as  pleas- 
ant schooling  for  the  young,  were  it  not  that  Mr. 
Mitchell  shows  the  amateur's  dread  of  stating  a 
simple  fact.  They  presuppose  too  much  know- 
ledge for  the  beginner,  and  they  are  not  solid 
enough  critically  for  the  mature.  Nor  can  one 
be  quite  sure  of  his  fiction.  I  profess  myself  able 
to  read  Dr.  Johns,  at  least  the  greater  part  of  it, 
with  a  kind  of  pious  delight,  but  I  am  doubtful  of 
its  power  over  those  who  have  not  been  baptised 
in  the  clear,  cool  springs  of  New  England  tradi- 
tion. Too  many  readers,  I  fear,  will  feel  like  the 
sinner  of  the  story,  who  wrote  to  the  saintly 
minister  from  his  wanderings : 

»  The  Works  of  Donald  G.  Mitchell.  Edgewood 
Edition,  in  fifteen  volumes.  New  York:  Charles 
Scribner's  Sons,  1907. 


l6o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

I  shall  never  forget  the  cheery  joyousness  of  that  little 
family  scene  at  your  fireside,  the  winning  modesty  and 
womanliness  of  your  lost  Rachel,  and  the  serenity  and 
peace  that  lay  about  your  household.  It  was  to  me, 
fresh  from  the  vices  of  Europe,  like  some  charming 
Christian  idyl,  in  whose  atmosphere  I  felt  myself  not 
only  an  alien,  but  a  profane  intruder. 

The  first  half  of  the  book  is  indeed  a  charming 
Christian  idyl,  belonging  to  that  little  backwater 
from  the  world's  current  where  frail  plants  open 
and  send  out  their  aroma  and  fade  away  in  the 
still  shade.  It  requires  more  intellectual  absti- 
nence than  most  of  us  possess  to  relish  fully  the 
savour  of  this  old  idealised  New  England.  The 
passions  of  life  have  no  place  in  this  sheltered 
retreat,  and  when  in  the  course  of  events  these 
break  upon  the  scene  the  tale  loses  its  amulet  of 
reticence  and  becomes  only  futile. 

It  is  by  his  more  personal  works  Mr.  Mitchell 
will  be  remembered  for  a  while,  by  his  chapters  of 
European  travel  and  his  pictures  of  country  life 
at  Edgewood.  He  himself  has  told  us  how,  when 
a  young  man,  he  was  called  from  working  an 
old  Connecticut  farm  to  travel  abroad.  That 
was  in  the  forties,  when  Longfellow's  Hyperion 
had  set  a  new  model  for  sentimental  reminiscences, 
and  it  was  inevitable  that  the  traveller  on  his 
return  should  shake  out  his  note-books,  kept  re- 
ligiously in  shorthand,  and  give  the  world  a  vol- 
ume of  Gleayiings.  And  the  book  is  well  worth 
reading  to-day.  France  and  Austria  and  Holland 
were  still  a  land  of  discovery ;  it  was  still  possible 


DONALD    G.    MITCHELL  l6l 

to  wonder  at  the  gay  wicked  life  of  the  Parisians, 
who  had  no  knowledge  of  "  our  glorious  Saxon 
home-spirit ' ' ;  the  roads  of  lUyria  led  even  fur- 
ther into  the  kingdom  of  romance  than  thej^  do 
now;  and  the  Dutchman  was  always  artistically 
placid  and  steeped  in  tobacco.  Your  traveller  was 
not  ashamed  to  muse  over  a  bunch  of  flowers  given 
him  by  a  pretty  waiting-maid,  as  he  was  bold 
enough  to  confess  that  he  had  often  "  drained  a 
good  tankard  of  home-brewed,  and  felt  myself — 
not  a  whit  the  worse  for  it"  (only  a  dash  could 
prepare  the  reader  for  the  enormity  of  such  a  con- 
fession). Well,  innocence  for  innocence,  senti- 
ment for  sentiment,  I  prefer  the  sunny  Latin  and 
Italian  romance  colouring  Mr.  Mitchell's  memoirs 
to  the  nebulous  fog  of  Teutonism  that  drifts 
through  the  pages  of  Hyperion.  That  is  my 
foible,  if  you  will,  but  the  companion  who  can 
beguile  me  through  Europe  with  scraps  of  the 
classical  poets  we  learned  at  school,  has  made  me 
his  humble  servant  for  ever  after.  "The  clouds 
thickened  gradually  into  darkness,"  says  Mr. 
Mitchell  at  the  beginning  of  his  book,  "  for  the 
sun  was  down; — ponto  nox  inciibat  atra — black 
night  brooded  on  the  waters;  the  very  half  line 
came  to  me,  as  I  sat  hugging  the  low  bulwarks, 
and  gasping  between  the  gusts."  With  so  Vir- 
gilian  a  comrade  I  protest  I  can  cross  even  the 
Channel  without  bickering.  And  how  shall  I 
quarrel  with  a  friend  who  quotes  Tacitus  and 
Juvenal  to  me  at  Lyons ;  or  at  Vaucluse  reminds 


1 62  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

me  of ' '  some  heart-killing  Laura  in  his  Home- 
land ' '  in  the  language  of  Petrarch — nelle  medesime 
dolenti  parole ;  or  excuses  his  surrender  of  alms  to 
a  bewitching  little  beggar  maid  with  the  old  tag, 
Semper  causa  est,  cur  ego  semper  a7nem.  f  We  have 
lost  this  trick  of  easy,  high-bred  quotation,  and  the 
world  is  a  shabbier  place  thereby.  To  go  about 
with  Virgil  and  Horace  in  one's  mind  is  to  travel 
as  a  gentleman,  and  justifies  a  little  contempt  for 
the  contemporaneity  of  the  intellectual  upstart. 

At  the  age  of  thirty-three,  having  travelled  ex- 
tensively, and  seen  something  of  consular  service, 
having,  in  orthodox  fashion,  jilted  the  law  for 
literature,  Mr.  Mitchell  bought  an  estate  outside 
of  New  Haven  and  settled  down  for  the  rest 
of  his  life  as  a  gentleman  farmer  and  land- 
scape gardener.  The  result  of  this  experience 
we  have  in  three  slender  volumes.  Wet  Days  at 
Edgewood,  My  Farm  at  Edgewood,  and  Out-of- 
Town  Places — by  all  odds  his  most  successful 
literary  work,  because  here  the  strain  of  ama- 
teurishness is  the  very  pith  and  marrow  of  the 
theme.  And  the  best  of  these  is  the  first.  One 
may  cavil  at  his  language  sometimes,  at  his  ' '  ru- 
ralities  "  and  "ruralisms" — horrid  words;  one 
may  wish  that  he  showed  more  respect  for  our 
ignorance,  and  dealt  more  liberally  with  element- 
ary facts,  but,  after  all,  what  a  delight  it  is  to 
have  so  genial  an  exponent  of  the  long  line  of 
farm  and  garden  writers  from  Hesiod  down  to  the 
authority  of  yesterday  : 


DONALD    G.    MITCHELL  1 63 

In  that  corner  of  my  library  which  immediately  flanks 
the  east  window  is  bestowed  a  motley  array  of  farm- 
books  ;  there  are  fat  ones  in  yellow  vellum  ;  there  are 
ponderous  folios  and  stately  dedications  to  some  great 
man  we  never  heard  of ;  there  are  thin  tractates  in  am- 
bitious type,  which  promised,  fifty  years  and  more  ago 
[a  hundred  and  more,  now]  to  overset  all  the  established 
methods  of  farming  ;  there  is  Jethro  Tull,  in  his  irate 
way,  thrashing  all  down  his  columns  the  effete  Virgilian 
husbandry  ;  there  is  the  sententious  talk  ot  Cato,  the 
latinity  of  Columella,  and  some  little  musty  duodecimo, 
hunted  down  upon  the  quays  of  Paris,  with  such  title  as 
Comes  RusticHS  ;  there  is  the  first  thin  quarto  of  Judge 
Buel's  Cultivalor—?,\rice  expanded  into  the  well-ordered 
stateliness  of  the  Country  Gentleman  ;  there  are  black- 
letter  volumes  of  Barnaby  Googe,  and  books  compiled 
by  the  distinguished  "Captain  Garvase  Markhame"  ; 
and  there  is  Xenophon  flanked  by  a  Hesiod,  and  the 
heavy  Greek  squadron  of  the  Geoponics.  I  delight  im- 
mensely in  taking  an  occasional  wet-day  talk  with  these 
old  worthies. 

What  names  and  what  memories  ?  How  Barnaby 
Googe  and  Jethro  Tull  smack  of  the  fat  English 
soil ;  how  deep  a  furrow  of  the  mind  has  been  left 
by  the  effete  Virgilian  husbandry  !  And  there 
are  other  names  that  take  their  proper  place  in 
the  papers  that  follow — Horace  and  all  the  poets 
who  have  retired  from  the  city  to  their  modus  agri 
nan  ita  magnus,  even  Boileau,  who,  according 
to  his  gardener,  had  no  eyes  for  growing  trees 
though  he  would  have  been  keen  enough  for  the 
crop  if  St.  Augustine  and  St.  Chrysostom  had 
been  planted  ;  Italians  of  the  Renaissance  who 


l64  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

joined  the  arts  of  ploughing  and  of  living  ;  philo- 
sophers and  exiled  princes,  and  all  who  have 
gained  the  world  by  losing  it.  "  To  be  a  husband- 
man," says  Cowley,  for  whom  Mr.  Mitchell  might 
have  found  a  niche  in  his  long  gallery  of  honour 
— "  to  be  a  husbandman  is  but  a  retreat  from  the 
city  ;  to  be  a  philosopher,  from  the  world,  or, 
rather,  a  retreat  from  the  world  as  it  is  man's  into 
the  world  as  it  is  God's.  But,  since  nature  denies 
to  most  men  the  capacity  or  appetite,  and  fortune 
allows  but  to  a  very  few  the  opportunities  or  pos- 
sibility of  applying  themselves  wholly  to  philo- 
sophy, the  best  mixture  of  human  affairs  that  we 
can  make  are  the  employments  of  a  country  life. 
It  is,  as  Columella  calls  it.  Res  sine  dubitatione 
proxima  et  quasi  consanguinea  sapientics — the 
nearest  neighbour,  or  rather  next  in  kindred,  to 
philosophy." 

It  is  not  Mr.  Mitchell's  literary  cunning  we 
admire  so  much,  although  he  has  shown  con- 
siderable art  in  weaving  together  his  own  farm 
experiences  with  these  studies  of  his  forebears, 
and  has  weighted  the  whole  with  allusions  to  the 
civil  war  that,  while  he  wrote,  was  calling  our 
young  men  from  the  plough  as  it  had  taken  them 
in  the  days  of  Virgil : 

Ne  pueri,  ne  tanta  animis  assuescite  bella, 
Neu  patriae  validas  in  viscera  vertite  vires. 

Yet  it  is  not  his  art  we  admire  so  much  as  the  life 
he  describes,  with  its  rare  union  of  the  scholar 


DONALD    G.    MITCHELL  165 

and  the  farmer,  of  the  love  for  books  and  for  the 
soil.  Every  page  of  his  writings  shows  that  the 
author  has  a  wide  and  genial  acquaintance  with 
literature,  but  it  is  equally  plain  that  he  is  at 
home  with  the  implements  of  the  field.  "  There 
is  no  manner  of  work  done  upon  a  New  England 
farm,"  he  says,  with  pardonable  pride,  "  to  which 
some  day  I  have  not  put  my  hand— whether  it 
be  chopping  wood,  laying  wall,  sodding  a  coal- 
pit, cradling  oats,  weeding  corn,  shearing  sheep, 
or  sowing  turnips."  And  elsewhere,  summing 
up  the  profit  of  his  labours,  he  adds  :  "  Nature 
has  solemnised  the  marriage  of  the  beautiful  with 
the  practical."  The  words  are  nothing  less  than 
an  invitation  to  set  this  union  of  practice  and  con- 
templation over  against  the  saunterings  of  Thor- 
eau  and  Emerson  and  others,  who  desired  the 
romantic  alone  in  nature  and  scorned  laborious 
days.  The  comparison  of  their  books  may  be 
misleading,  for  the  Concord  men  were  far  above 
our  gentleman  farmer  in  the  persuasive  use  of 
words  ;  to  make  the  point  clear  we  should  turn 
rather  to  more  authoritative  names,  such  as 
Wordsworth  and  Virgil.  What,  after  all  is  the 
lesson  of  the  Exairsion,  and  how  does  it  stand  in 
naked  veracity  beside  the  Geo7'gics  ?  How  does 
that  "virgin  passion  of  a  soul,  Communing 
with  the  glorious  universe"  measure  beside  the 
Roman's  sober  sense  of  toilsome  duty?  Words- 
worth has  compressed  his  reading  of  life  into  a 
melodious  stanza  : 


1 66  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

One  impulse  from  a  vernal  wood 

May  teach  you  more  of  man, 
Of  moral  evil  and  of  good, 

Than  all  the  sages  can — 

which,  be  it  said  with  due  respect,  is  good  verse 
but  literal  folly.  Nor  does  it  yet  appear  a  fact 
that  idle  revery  in  the  fields  is  better  for  a  man's 
soul  than  the  discipline  of  Plato  and  Jesus.  Cer- 
tainly such  is  not  the  teaching  of  Virgil: 

Labor  omnia  vicit 
Improbus,  et  duris  urgens  in  rebus  egestas.  .  .  . 
Omnia  quae  multo  ante  memor  provisa  repones, 
Si  te  digna  manet  divini  gloria  ruris. 

We  are  but  diirum  genus,  sprung  from  the  soil, 
and  only  through  harsh  labour  and  faithful  hoard- 
ing of  experience  shall  we  make  our  own  the 
glory  of  the  divine  country. 

And  so  I  return  to  our  lesser  philosophers  of 
New  England  and  say  boldly  that  more  of  the  true 
wisdom  of  nature  is  to  be  found  in  Mr.  Mitchell's 
story  of  Edgewood  than  in  Waldeyi.  I  know  the 
canniness  of  Emerson's  Apology: 

Think  me  not  unkind  and  rude 

That  I  walk  alone  in  grove  and  glen  ; 

I  go  to  the  god  of  the  wood 
To  fetch  his  word  to  men. 


One  harvest  from  thy  field 

Homeward  brought  the  oxeu  strong  ; 
A  second  crop  thine  acres  yield, 

Which  I  gather  in  a  song. 


DONALD    G.    MITCHELL  1 67 

But  is  the  implication  really  sound  ?  Nay,  I 
doubt  that  the  honest  ploughman  may  carry  back 
from  the  fields,  buried  deep  in  his  heart  and  un- 
expressed, a  masculine  acquaintance  with  natural 
law  such  as  the  gazing  rhapsodist  shall  never 
possess.  Perhaps,  as  a  child  of  the  city,  I  may  be 
barred  out  from  judging  these  high  matters.  Yet 
I  too  have  had  my  share  of  Thorellian  vagabond- 
age— who  has  not  in  these  days  ? — and  have  even 
relived  in  humbler  fashion  the  experiment  of 
Walden.  I  know  how  easy  it  is  to  wander  by 
the  river's  brink,  meditating  on  the  eternities,  or  to 
discover  the  Holy  Grail  in  the  chalice  of  a  flower. 
Doubtless  these  solitary  communings  vnth  nature 
are  a  desirable  antidote  to  the  fever  of  the  world  ; 
they  have  their  incalculable  reward,  but  their  very 
facility  is  a  warning  not  to  trust  them  too  far. 
For  my  part,  I  shall  suspect  always  that,  failing 
the  initiation  of  plough  and  harrow,  I  have  still 
come  short  of  the  greater  mysteries.  It  is  some- 
thing to  observe  idly  the  fresh  miracles  of  spring, 
but  I  repeat  the  opening  of  the  Georgics  and  know 
how  far  this  is  from  the  joy  of  feeling  one's  self  a 
partner  in  the  earth's  great  task  of  renovation. 
It  is  something  to  watch  with  unconcern  the  tem- 
pestuous glory  of  the  clouds,  but  again  I  recall 
the  storm  in  Virgil  and  know  how  different  are 
the  emotions  of  one  who  spells  his  prosperity  or 
ruin  in  the  portents  of  the  sky.  Alas,  labor  im- 
probus!  it  is  not  facile  enthusiasm  alone,  but  the 
curse-bom  sweat  of  the  brow  that  shall  at  last 


1 68  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

bring  a  man  into  harmony  with  the  stern  realities 
of  nature.'  And  even  though  unremitting  toil 
benumb  the  fancy  to  the  dulness  of  the  day,  there 
is  left  the  wholesome  instinct  of  the  soil.  Mr. 
Mitchell  himself  reduces  this  virtue  to  the  lowest 
point : 

Rural  life  oflFers  charming  objects  of  study  ;  but  to  most 
minds  it  does  not  offer  the  promptings  for  large  intellec- 
tual exertion.  It  ripens  healthfully  all  the  receptive 
faculties  ;  it  disposes  to  that  judicial  calmness  of  mind 
which  is  essential  to  clearness  and  directness  of  vision  ; 
but  it  does  not  kindle  the  heat  of  large  and  ambitious  en- 
deavour. Hence  we  often  find  that  a  man  who  has  passed 
the  first  half  of  his  life  in  comparative  isolation,  cultivat- 
ing his  resources  quietly,  unmoved  by  the  disturbances 
and  the  broils  of  civic  life,  will,  on  transfer  to  public 
scenes,  and  stirred  by  that  emulation  which  comes  of 
contact  with  the  world,  feel  all  his  faculties  lighted  with 
a  new  glow,  and  accomplish  results  which  are  as  much  a 
wonder  to  himself  as  to  others. 

We  go  out,  poor  children  of  the  city,  to  scamper 
up  the  mountain  paths  or  loiter  on  the  seashore, 
or  mayhap,  being  country-bred,  we  make  a  pro- 
fession of  studying  and  discoursing  nature.  But 
never  in  this  way,  I  believe,  shall  we  possess  the 
strength  and  silent  instinct  of  the  soil  that  are 
nurtured  by  working  with  the  forces  of  earth  and 
air,  or  the  deeper  yet  still  unuttered  understand- 
ing that  rewards  such  labour  when  crowned  by 

'  Has  any  one  thought  to  compare  the  curse  in  Genesis 
with  the  Virgilian  Pater  ipse  colendi  Haul  facilem  esse 
viam  voluitf 


DONALD    G.     MITCHELL  1 69 

observation  and  reflection.  It  is  because  I  read 
something  of  this  sacred  experience  in  the  Edge- 
wood  books,  that  I  can  prize  them  above  their 
verbal  merit. 

As  for  the  full  story  of  Mr.  Mitchell's  own  life, 
I  do  not  know  how  far  he  has  shared  the  common 
lot  of  evil  and  disappointment  in  his  eighty-five 
years  ;  I  should  not  care  to  knock  at  the  door  of 
Edgewood  and  beg  his  acquaintance,  for,  gentle 
to  all  the  rest  of  the  world,  he  bristles  with  irasci- 
bility at  the  mere  mention  of  editor  or  critic  ;  but 
it  is  impossible  to  think  of  him  otherwise  than 
as  rich  in  content,  enjoying  the  harvest  of  a  well- 
ploughed  mind,  sitting  at  this  moment,  it  may  be, 
amid  his  many  books  of  husbandry,  by  the  window 
that  looks  out  over  his  farm,  over  the  spires  and 
belfries  of  New  Haven,  to  the  gleaming  line  of 
water  and  the  lighthouse  yonder  upon  the  point. 
May  we  not  once  more,  in  taking  leave  of  Mr. 
Mitchell,  make  use  of  the  poet  he  has  himself  so 
often  quoted,  and  liken  his  state  to  that  of  Virgil's 
old  man  of  Tarentum  who,  in  the  possession  of  a 
few  acres  of  exacting  land,  equalled  in  spirit  the 
wealth  of  kings.     But, 

.   .   .  haec  ipse  equidem  spatiis  exclusus  iniquis 
Praetereo  atque  aliis  post  me  memoranda  relinquo. 


JAMES  THOMSON  ("B.  V.")- 

TwKNTY  years  ago,  when  I  chanced  upon  The 
City  of  Dreadful  Night,  and  for  some  time  after 
that,  I  enjoyed  in  Thomson  the  flattering  sense 
of  proprietorship  which  comes  with  discovery. 
He  was  in  fact  almost  unknown  then,  outside  of 
England  where  he  had  his  few  but  enthusiastic 
admirers,  and  it  has  been  a  matter  of  curious 
interest,  not  without  a  spark  of  pardonable  jeal- 
ousy, to  observe  the  slow  dissemination  of  his 
fame.  Popular,  indeed,  he  can  never  be,  but  the 
recent  publication  of  a  German  monograph  on 
his  life  and  works  *  shows  at  least  to  what  extent 

^  fames  Thomson  der  fiingere,  sein  Leben  und  seine 
Werke.  Dargestellt  von  Josefine  Weissel.  Wiener  Bei- 
trage  zur  englischen  Philologie,  xxiv. — lyike  the  earlier 
Wiener  Beitrage,  so  far  as  I  am  familiar  with  them,  this 
study  possesses  some  value  as  a  compendious  statement 
of  facts,  but  is  otherwise  a  hodge-podge  of  stale  pedan- 
tries. It  sometimes  seems  as  if  to  the  German  university 
mind  the  whole  intellectual  World  between  Kant  and  the 
Card  Catalogue,  between  metaphysics  and  mechanism, 
were  non-existent ;  as  if  it  had  no  sense  for  the 
great  practical  region  where  life  and  books  come  to- 
gether. The  inconsiderate  printing  of  doctoral  and  other 
perfunctory  theses  in  Germany,  and  also  in  America,  has 
grown  to  be  a  menace  to  sound  learning.  If  they  have 
any  virtue,  it  is  in  dragging  into  the  light  of  day  the 
absurd  theory  that  original  production  is  the  right  dis- 

170 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  171 

he  has  been  accepted  as'  a  significant  factor  in 
the  literature  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Such 
dubious  honour  at  the  hands  of  the  Sejnmar,  one 
feels,  might  have  been  spared  the  memory  of  a 
poet  to  whom  life  itself  was  a  long  indignity. 
And  that  life  had  already  been  told  by  H.  S.  Salt, 
well  and  sympathetically. 

James  Thomson  —  he  signed  his  writings 
* '  B.  V. " ,  z'.  ^. ,  Bysshe  Vanolis,  to  avoid  the  name  of 
the  older  poet  and  to  mark  his  reverence  for  Shel- 
ley and  Novalis — was  born  at  Port  Glasgow, 
November  23,  1834.  When  he  was  six  years  old 
his  father,  who  was  a  sailor,  came  back  from  a 
distant  voyage  a  helpless  paralytic,  living  in  this 
state  until  1853.  ^^^  family  moved  to  East 
London,  and  from  there,  at  the  age  of  eight, 
James  was  admitted  to  the  Royal  Caledonian 
Asylum.  At  this  time  his  mother  died.  She 
was,  he  says,  "  mystically  inclined  with  Edward 
Irving,"  and  "had  also  a  cloud  of  melancholy 
overhanging  her."  Superstition,  disease,  poverty, 
and,  one  suspects,  intemperance  must  have  made 
the  child's  home  scarcely  more  desirable  than  the 
Asylum.  Writing  to  his  sister-in-law  in  the  last 
year  of  his  life,  he  describes  the  change  eflfected 
by  the  father's  mishap: 

Before  then  I  think  he  was  a  good  husband  and  a  kind 
father  ;  her  I  always  remember  as  a  loving  mother  and 

cipline  ,and  the  only  test  of  scholarship.  And  now 
Thomson  has  received  his  crown  of  thorns  at  the  court 
of  the  Seminar. 


172  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

•wife She  was  more  serious,  and  pious  too,  following 

Irving  from  the  Kirk  when  he  was  driven  out.  I  re- 
member well  Irving's  portrait  under  yellow  gauze,  and 
some  books  of  his  on  the  interpretation  of  prophecy, 
which  I  used  to  read  for  the  imagery.  The  paralysis  at 
first  unhinged  father's  mind,  and  he  had  some  fits  of 
violence  ;  more  generally  his  temper  was  strange,  dis- 
agreeable, not  to  be  depended  upon. .  .  .  Before  I  went  to 
the  School  he  used  to  take  me  to  chapels  where  the 
members  of  the  congregation  ejaculated  groaning  re- 
sponses to  the  minister's  prayer,  and  to  small  meetings 
in  a  private  room  where  the  members  detailed  their 
spiritual  experiences  of  the  week. 

All  these  dreary  things  it  is  necessary  to  take 
into  account  when  we  pass  j  udgment  on  Thom- 
son's  habits  and  works.  He  was,  as  he  says, 
from  his  childhood  an  "  Ishmael  in  the  desert." 
From  the  Caledonian  he  passed  to  the  Royal 
Military  Asylum  at  Chelsea,  where  he  studied 
for  a  schoolmastership  in  the  army,  showing,  as 
throughout  Hfe,  marked  ability  in  mathematics. 
His  first  position  was  that  of  assistant  teacher  at 
the  garrison  of  Ballincollig,  about  five  miles  from 
Cork.  Here  he  came  under  the  care  of  a  kind 
and  intelligent  garrison-master,  Joseph  Barnes, 
who,  with  his  wife,  made  a  second  home  for  the 
brilliant  young  assistant.  Here,  too,  he  became 
acquainted  with  Charles  Bradlaugh,  the  radical 
poHtician  and  atheist,  then  a  soldier  of  the  regi- 
ment, who  remained  his  friend  for  more  than 
twenty-three  years,  and  who  was  a  strong  influence 
for  good  and  evil  in  the  poet's  future  life.     Per- 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  1 73 

haps  even  more  important  than  this  acquaintance, 
was  his  meeting  with  a  fair  and  frail  young  girl 
of  fourteen,  named  Matilda  Weller,  who  was 
likened  by  Mrs.  Barnes  to  Eva  St.  Clair  in 
Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  a  creature  of  "undulating 
and  aerial  grace,  such  as  one  might  dream  of  for 
some  mythic  and  allegorical  being. .  .  .  Always 
dressed  in  white,  she  seemed  to  move  like  a 
shadow  through  all  sorts  of  places  without  con- 
tracting spot  or  stain."  Though  but  little  more 
than  a  child  at  the  time — like  Hardenberg's 
Sophie — she  was  betrothed  to  Thomson  when, 
after  a  year  and  a  half  at  Ballincollig,  he  re- 
turned to  the  Chelsea  Normal  School ;  in  another 
six  months  he  received  the  news  of  her  death. 
Years  afterward  he  sent  six  sonnets,  not  intended 
for  publication,  to  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Barnes,  and  in 
one  of  them  alluded  to  this  bitter  bereavement : 

Indeed  you  set  me  in  a  happy  place, 

Dear  for  itself  and  dearer  much  for  you. 
And  dearest  still  for  one  life-crowning  grace — 

Dearest,  though  infinitely  saddest  too  : 
For  there  my  own  Good  Angel  took  my  hand, 

And  filled  my  soul  with  glory  of  her  eyes, 
And  led  me  through  the  love-lit  Faerie  Land 

Which  joins  our  common  world  to  Paradise. 
How  soon,  how  soon,  God  called  her  from  my  side, 

Back  to  her  own  celestial  sphere  of  day  ! 
And,  ever  since  she  ceased  to  be  my  Guide, 

I  reel  and  stumble  on  life's  solemn  way  ; 
Ah,  ever  since  her  eyes  withdrew  their  light, 
I  wander  lost  in  blackest  stormy  night. 


174  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Here  is  a  problem  against  which  criticism  has 
dashed  itself  and  may  continue  to  dash  itself:  Is 
it  true,  as  he  intimates,  that  this  early  loss  was 
the  cause  of  his  reeling  and  stumbling — unfor- 
tunate metaphor  ! — down  the  way  to  ruin  ?  Who 
shall  decide?  Who,  seeing  the  shipwreck  of  a 
man's  life,  "and  the  pale  master  on  his  spar- 
strewn  deck,"  shall  say  boldly  it  is  due  to  this  or 
that  accident  when  the  vessel  left  port,  forgetting 
the  trade- winds  that  blow  despotic  across  that  sea? 
Vain  surmises.  There  is  even  a  kind  of  callous 
inhumanity  in  groping  too  curiously  among  the 
obscurer  elements  of  a  complete  and  pitiful  down- 
fall. It  is  suflScient  to  know  that  through  all  the 
desolation  and  at  times  the  terror  of  his  future 
life  that  beautiful  hope,  turned  now  into  a  more 
radiant  memory,  never  quite  abandoned  him.  It 
speaks  in  man}'-  of  his  shorter  poems  ;  in  77;*? 
Fadeless  Bower  the  passion  of  recollection  fixes 
one  moment  of  that  episode  into  a  changeless 
image,  able,  like  Keats's  "  brede  of  marble  men," 
to  "tease  us  out  of  thought  as  doth  eternity"  : 

Behold  her  as  she  standeth  there 

Breathless,  with  fixed,  awe-shadowed  eyes* 

Beneath  her  moon-touched  golden  hair  ! 
Her  spirit's  pure  humilities 

Are  trembling,  half  would  disavow 

The  crown  I  bring  to  crown  her  brow.  .  .  . 

O  happy  bud,  for  ever  young. 

For  ever  just  about  to  blow  ! 
O  happy  love  upon  whose  tongue 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("B.    V.")  1 75 

The  Yes  doth  ever  trembling  grow  ! 
O  happiest  Twain,  whose  deathless  bower 
Embalms  you  in  life's  crowning  hour  ! 

In  Vane's  Story  the  incidents  of  some  actual 
dance  of  the  old  Irish  days,  told  in  the  half 
humorous,  half  quizzical  manner  that  Thomson 
always  adopted  in  his  more  realistic  vein,  are 
joined  to  a  vision  of  love  stooping  down  to  him 
as  a  celestial  monitress  and  comforter  : 

How  long  in  this  sweet  swoon  I  lay, 

What  hours  or  years  I  cannot  say  ; 

Vast  arcs  of  the  celestial  sphere 

Subtend  such  little  angles  here. 

But  after  the  ineffable, 

This  first  I  can  remember  well  : 

A  Rose  of  Heaven,  so  dewy  sweet 

Its  fragrance  was  a  soul  complete. 

Came,  touched  my  brow,  caressed  my  lips, 

And  then  my  eyes  in  their  eclipse  ; 

And  still  I  stirred  not,  though  there  came 

A  wine  of  fire  through  all  my  frame, 

An  ecstasy  of  joy  and  love, 

A  vision  of  the  throne  above, 

A  myriad-voiced  triumphant  psalm 

XJpswelling  through  a  splendour  calm  ; 

Then  suddenly,  as  if  a  door 

Were  shut,  veiled  silence  as  before. 

In  many  of  these  poems  there  is  a  certain  jar- 
ring note,  as  if  the  past  still  lived  its  own  life 
within  him  unreconciled  with  the  present,  or  as  if 
two  poets  held  the  pen  alternately  ;  but  in  what 
are  perhaps  the  best-known  lines  he  ever  wrote 


176  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

this  discord  between  memory  and  reality  is  itself 
raised  into  a  symbol  of  intensely  tragic  fate. 
Bvery  one  who  knows  The  City  of  Dreadful 
Night  will  recall  his  impression  of  awe,  or  per- 
haps of  simple  amazement,  when  he  first  came  to 
the  episode  of  the  woman — ' '  O  desolation  moving 
with  such  grace  !  " — with  the  red  lamp,  "her  own 
burning  heart, ' '  upon  the  seashore  : 

As  I  came  through  the  desert  thus  it  was, 
As  I  came  through  the  desert  :     By  the  sea 
She  knelt  and  bent  above  that  senseless  me  : 
Those  lamp-drops  fell  upon  my  white  brow  there. 
She  tried  to  cleanse  them  with  her  tears  and  hair  ; 
She  murmured  words  of  pity,  love,  and  woe. 
She  heeded  not  the  level  rushing  flow  : 

And  mad  with  rage  and  fear, 

I  stood  stonebound  so  near. 

As  I  came  through  the  desert  thus  it  was, 

As  I  came  through  the  desert :     When  the  tide 

Swept  up  to  her  there  kneeling  by  my  side. 

She  clasped  that  corpse-like  me,  and  they  were  borne 

Away,  and  this  vile  me  was  left  forlorn  ; 

I  know  the  whole  sea  cannot  quench   that  heart, 

Or  cleanse  that  brow,  or  wash  those  two  apart : 

They  love  ;  their  doom  is  drear, 

Yet  they  nor  hope  nor  fear  ; 

But  I,  what  do  I  here  ? 

It  is  customary,  I  do  not  know  just  why,  to 
sneer  rather  sceptically  at  these  ideal  loves,  these 
I,auras  and  Beatrices  of  the  poets,  as  if  they  were 
all  as  imaginary  as  the  mad  Don's  Dulcinea. 
And  yet,  in  the  case  of  such  a  life  as  Thomson's, 


JAMES   THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  1 77 

I  should  suppose  it  natural  that  the  one  gleam  of 
perfect  youthful  happiness  might  in  the  first 
years  of  bustling  ambition  be  forgotten,  but  that 
afterwards,  when  disappointment  and  despond- 
ency thickened  upon  him,  it  would  return  al- 
ways at  more  frequent  intervals,  and  with  brighter 
radiance,  gathering  to  itself  all  the  light  of  broken 
hopes  and  wasted  capabilities.  How  often  in  the 
nights  of  troubled  sleep  and  feverish  insomnia, 
for  from  this  evil  he  suffered  terribly,  must  the 
memory  of  that  joy  have  flashed  upon  him  with 
an  importunity  as  keen  as  the  vision  of  food  to 
the  starving  castaway.  There  was  no  home  with 
wife  and  children  (for  which  he  longed  always 
with  passionate  regret)  to  mitigate  his  loss,  no 
full  and  absorbing  career. 

For  a  while  indeed  he  was  busy  enough.  After 
leaving  the  Chelsea  School  the  second  time,  be- 
ing then  scarcely  twenty  years  of  age,  he  was  en- 
listed as  army  schoolmaster,  and  served  at  a 
number  of  posts,  "pumping  muddy  information 
into  unretentive  sieves."  In  1862  he  was  impli- 
cated in  an  ofience  against  camp  discipline,  and 
was  discharged  because  he  would  not  give  up  the 
name  of  the  actual  culprit.  He  now  came  to 
lyondon,  where  he  got  a  clerkship  in  a  solicitor's 
oflace,  and  began  also  to  write  for  the  magazines. 
For  some  time  he  lodged  with  Bradlaugh,  then 
engaged  in  the  affairs  of  the  Secular  party  and  in 
editing  its  political  organ.  His  association  with 
that  uncompromising  radical  and  free-thinker  was, 


lyS  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

as  I  have  said,  a  doubtful  benefit.  It  gave  him, 
to  be  sure,  a  means  of  reaching  the  public  when 
the  more  regular  magazines  were  closed  against 
him,  and  for  ten  or  twelve  years  he  contributed  to 
the  National  Reformer  his  best  work,  including 
The  City  of  Dreadful  Night,  which  appeared  in 
four  consecutive  issues.  That  periodical  and 
Cope' s  Tobacco  Plant  were  his  chief  source  of  in- 
come when  his  clerkship  was  given  up.  But  I  can- 
not help  feeling  that  the  atmosphere  of  universal 
dissent  injured  the  finer  qualities  of  his  peculiar 
mind  ;  above  all  men  he  needed  the  rich  sustain- 
ing influence  of  tradition  and  human  brotherhood 
to  soften  the  asperity  of  his  individual  lot.  It  is 
true  commonly  in  poetry  as  in  religion :  multum 
contrariatur superncB  visitatiotiifalsa  libertas  animi. 
Who  can  say  how  much  the  narrowness  of  his 
appeal  and  the  sharp  contraction  of  his  pessimism 
are  due  to  the  egotism  of  this  false  liberty  of  mind? 
But  friends  came  to  him  gradually,  and  even  a 
measure  of  fame.  He  corresponded  with  W.  M. 
Rossetti ;  while  George  Eliot,  George  Meredith, 
the  Brownings,  and  other  choice  spirits  recognised 
his  genius  and  wrote  to  him  in  language  of  en- 
couraging flattery.  Various  engagements  were 
opened  to  him.  In  1872  he  was  sent  to  this 
country  by  a  mining  company,  and  for  seven 
months  he  stayed  among  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
sending  home  letters  of  graphic  description  and 
humorous  comment.  The  next  year  he  went  to 
Spain  as  special  correspondent  of  the  New  York 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  1 79 

World;  but  as  he  contributed  only  three  letters  in 
two  months  that  connection  was  soon  dissolved. 
His  ruinous  habit  was  already  gaining  on  him, 
and  year  by  year  he  became  less  trustworthy  and 
less  productive. 

Everybody  who  has  heard  his  name  knows 
what  that  habit  was.  His  taste  for  liquor  seems 
to  have  been  inherited,  but  did  not  show  itself  as 
a  dangerous  tendency  until  about  1855,  when  he 
was  serving  in  the  army.  He  was  not  a  regular 
drinker,  the  thirst  came  upon  him  as  a  periodic 
disease,  but  with  time  the  intervals  of  sobriety 
grew  less  and  the  lapses  more  terrible,  so  that  his 
life  might  be  compared  with  that  of  a  Jekyll-Hy  de, 
in  which  the  demon  slowly  won  the  mastery. 
His  last  years  were  the  tragedy  of  a  great  spirit 
hunted  down  and  ashamed.  There  were  kind 
friends  who  sought  him  for  his  brilliant  conversa- 
tion and  magnanimity  ;  he  had  always  the  more 
intimate  friendship  of  books  ;  but  his  life  as  a 
whole  was,  as  he  noted  in  his  diary,  "  obscure, 
dismal,  bewildered,  and  melancholy."  The  stan- 
zas written  on  his  forty-seventh  birthday  have  the 
same  note  of  final  and  irretrievable  hopelessness 
as  The  Nameless  One  of  Clarence  Mangan.  One 
who  knew  him  in  those  days  has  left  this  deeply- 
etched  portrait  of  his  decay  : 

He  looked  like  a  veteran  scarred  in  the  fierce  aflFrays  of 
life's  war  and  worn  by  the  strain  of  its  forced  marches. 
His  close-knit  form,  short  and  sturdy,  might  have  en- 
dured any  amount  of  mere  roughings,  if  its  owner  had 


l8o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

thought  it  worth  a  care.  It  is  rare  to  find  so  squarely 
massive  a  head,  combining  mathematical  power  with 
high  imagination  in  so  marked  a  degree.  Hence  the 
grim  logic  of  fact  that  gives  such  weird  force  to  all  his 
poetry.  You  could  see  the  shadow  that  "tremendous 
fate  "  had  cast  over  that  naturally  buoyant  nature.  It 
had  eaten  great  furrows  into  his  broad  brow,  and  cut 
tear-tracks  downwards  from  his  wistful  eyes,  so  plaintive 
and  brimful  of  unspeakable  tenderness  as  they  opened 
wide,  when  in  serious  talk.  ...  I  am  far  from  say- 
ing that  Thomson  did  not  find  any  happiness  in  life. 
His  wit  and  broad  fun  vied  with  his  varied  information 
and  gift  of  happy  talk  in  making  him  a  prince  of  good 
fellows;  and  he  least  of  all  would  be  suspected  of  har- 
bouring the  worm  in  his  jovial  heart.  But  these  were 
the  glints  of  sunshine  that  made  life  tolerable  ;  the  ever- 
smouldering  fire  of  unassuageable  grief  and  inextinguish- 
able despair  burned  the  core  out  of  that  great  heart  when 
the  curtain  of  night  hid  the  play-acting  scenes  of  the  day. 

It  is  said  that  his  last  months  were  ' '  a  slow 
suicide,  perceived  and  acquiesced  in  deliberately 
by  himself."  Death  came  to  him  in  1882,  in  his 
forty-eighth  year,  at  the  University  Hospital. 

The  literary  product  of  such  a  life  was  not 
likely  to  be  large,  or  its  quality  of  a  kind  to  at- 
tract many  readers.  In  1895  M^r.  Bertram  Dobell 
tried  the  public  with  a  complete  edition  of  his 
writings ;  he  actually  brought  out  his  Poetical 
"Works  in  two  volumes  (to  supersede  the  three 
original  issues  of  1880,  1881,  and  1884),  and  in 
the  next  year  a  singe  volume  containing  the 
Biographical  ayid  Critical  Studies ;  but  there  was 
no  encouragement  to  proceed  with  the  edition. 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  l8l 

For  the  rest,  the  Essays  and  Phantasies  of  1881 
can  still  be  bought,  though  at  a  somewhat  for- 
bidding price,  and  there  are  two  or  three  minor 
publications.  It  might  seem  that  his  prose  at 
least  should  be  popular.  As  a  critic  he  is  shrewd 
and  original,  somewhat  over-romantic  in  taste, 
but  always  judicial  in  tone  ;  the  studies  of  Ben 
Jonson  are  particularly  rich  and  variegated  in  in- 
terest. The  miscellaneous  essays  show  a  surpris- 
ing vein  of  humour  and  satire,  with  now  and  then 
a  flaimting  of  gorgeous  rhetoric  which  suggests  a 
union  of  De  Quincey  and  Poe.  The  probability 
is  that  his  greater  name  as  a  poet  of  pessimism 
has  deprived  him  of  a  good  many  readers  who 
have  been  frightened  away  by  that  ugly  word  ; 
in  a  very  literal  sense  his  reputation  has  become 
to  him  nominis  uvibra.  And  this  is  quite  natural^ 
for  it  is,  after  all,  by  his  four  pessimistic  poems — 
In  the  Room,  Insomnia^  The  City  of  Dreadful 
Night,  and  To  Our  Ladies  of  Death — that  he  has 
taken  a  unique  place  in  English  literature  and 
will  be  remembered.  Some,  I  dare  say,  would 
reckon  Vane's  Story,  or  Weddah  and  Om-El- 
Bonain,  or  one  of  his  two  Sunday  idyls  as  more 
notable  pieces  of  writing  than  In  the  Room  ;  but 
there  is  something  so  singularly  characteristic  in 
this  poem  that  it  groups  itself  imperatively  with 
the  three  acknowledged  masterpieces.  And  in  the 
grave  and  geometric  simplicity  of  the  stanzas  ;  in 
the  naive  complaints  of  mirror  and  table  and  cur- 
tain over  their  master,  who,  like  another  Chatter- 


l82  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

ton,  lies  heedless  of  everything ;  in  the  slow- 
heightening  of  wonder  and  mistrust  until  the  old 
bed  in  ' '  ponderous  bass ' '  speaks  out  the  fatal 
word : 

"  I  know  what  is  and  what  has  been  ; 

Not  anything  to  me  comes  strange, 
Who  in  so  many  years  have  seen 

And  lived  through  every  kind  of  change. 
I  know  when  men  are  good  or  bad, 

When  well  or  ill,"  he  slowly  said  ; 
"When  sad  or  glad,  when  sane  or  mad, 

And  when  they  sleep  alive  or  dead." 

At  this  last  word  of  solemn  lore 

A  tremor  circled  through  the  gloom, 
As  if  a  crash  upon  the  floor 

Had  jarred  and  shaken  all  the  room : 
For  nearly  all  the  listening  things 

Were  old  and  worn,  and  knew  what  curse 
Of  violent  change  death  often  brings, 

From  good  to  bad,  from  bad  to  worse  : — 

in  all  this  tragic-comic  inversion  of  life  wherein 
the  man  alone  acts  the  dumb  part,  there  is  a  liter- 
ary effect  which  we  so  commonly  hear  about, 
but  so  rarely  feel — a  veritable  shudder  of  the 
nerves.  How  often  must  Thomson  himself 
as  he  sat  in  his  I/Dndon  lodgings,  in  that  rigid 
tension,  perhaps,  which  preluded  a  return  of 
dipsomania,  have  prefigured  to  himself  a  day 
when  he  too  might  lie  "unconscious  of  the 
deep  disgrace  ' '  : 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  1 83 

And  while  the  black  night  nothing  saw, 

And  till  the  cold  morn  came  at  last, 
That  old  bed  held  the  room  in  awe 

With  tales  of  its  experience  vast. 
It  thrilled  the  gloom  ;  it  told  such  tales 

Of  human  sorrows  and  delights. 
Of  fever  moans  and  infant  wails. 

Of  births  and  deaths  and  bridal  nights. 

I  could  wish  that  the  flat  twenty-fifth  stanza 
had  been  blotted  ;  and  in  the  penultimate  line  of 
the  eighth  "  and  "  is  apparently  a  slip  for  or. 

After  In  the  Room  the  natural  transition  and 
contrast  is  Insomnia  with  its  burden  of  torture 
that  impelled  the  poet  night  after  night  to  rove 
the  streets  of  London.  The  stanza,  more  com- 
plicated in  structure  than  Thomson  generally 
employed,  is  handled  with  notable  skill ;  the  lan- 
guage is  at  once  analytic  and  magnificent ;  here, 
as  in  the  Opium-Eater  of  De  Quincey,  "  the  fierce 
chemistry  of  his  dreams  burns  daily  objects  into 
insufferable  splendour ' '  ;  and  yet  withal  the  poem, 
owing  to  its  overwrought  artificiality,  or,  it  may 
be,  to  its  too  visibly  pathologic  basis,  leaves  one 
colder  than  any  of  its  three  companion  pieces. 
Its  chief  value  (thematically,  not  chronologically) 
is  as  a  preparation  for  The  City  of  Dreadful  Night, 
seen  particularly  in  the  form  and  imagery  of  one 
of  the  concluding  stanzas  : 

Against  a  bridge's  stony  parapet 

I  leaned,  and  gazed  into  the  waters  black  ; 

And  marked  an  angry  morning  red  and  wet 
Beneath  a  livid  and  enormous  rack 


184  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Glare  out  confronting  the  belated  moon, 
Huddled  and  wan  and  feeble  as  the  swoon 

Of  featureless  Despair : 
When  some  straj'  workman,  half-asleep  but  lusty. 
Passed  urgent  through  the  rainpour  wild  and  gusty, 
I  felt  a  ghost  already,  planted  watching  there. 

For  this  poem  of  unrelieved  pessimism  is  simply 
the  impressions  of  an  insomniac  changed  from 
self-complaining  to  a  phantom  evocation  of  the 
London  as  he  came  to  know  it  from  his  fierce 
nocturnal  vigils — "  the  City  is  of  Night,  but  not 
of  Sleep"  : 

The  street-lamps  bum  amidst  the  baleful  glooms, 
Amidst  the  soundless  solitudes  immense 

Of  ranged  mansions  dark  and  still  as  tombs. 
The  silence  which  benumbs  or  strains  the  sense 

Fulfils  with  awe  the  soul's  despair  unweeping  : 

Myriads  of  habitants  are  ever  sleeping. 
Or  dead,  .or  fled  from  nameless  pestilence  ! 

Yet  as  in  some  necropolis  you  find 

Perchance  one  mourner  to  a  thousand  dead. 

So  there,  worn  faces  that  look  deaf  and  blind 
Like  tragic  masks  of  stone.     With  weary  tread. 

Each  wrapt  in  his  own  doom,  they  wander,  wander, 

Or  sit  foredone  and  desolately  ponder 

Through  sleepless  hours  with  heavy  drooping  head. 

In  the  sharpness  of  its  outlines,  in  the  balance  of 
its  members,  there  is  something  in  The  City 
of  Dreadful  Night  that  borders  on  the  geometry  of 
delirium.     The  body  of  the  work  is  composed  of 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  185 

a  series  of  brief  cantos  in  a  stanza  of  seven  lines, 
as  seen  above,  which,  for  its  perfect  fitness  to  the 
theme,  must  be  reckoned  one  of  the  few  remark- 
able inventions  of  prosody.  The  idea  of  the 
stanza  was  taken,  as  Thomson  himself  admits, 
from  that  of  Browning's  Guardian  Angel  in  the 
Dramatic  Lyrics,  but  the  changes  introduced  by 
Thomson  make  it  completely  his  own.  Browning, 
to  begin  with,  rhymed  the  seventh  line  with  the 
first  and  third ;  by  shifting  this  arrangement  so 
as  to  rhj'me  together  the  second,  fourth,  and  sev- 
enth, Thomson  reduced  eccentric  formlessness  to 
form,  and  gave  to  the  three  concluding  lines  the 
effect  of  a  slow,  melancholy  refrain.  A  different 
use  of  the  metrical  pauses  also,  immediately  felt  by 
the  reader  but  not  easily  described,  adds  a  heavy, 
brooding  quality  to  the  rhythm  quite  foreign  to 
Browning's  impulsive  temperament.  Alternat- 
ing with  these  descriptive  cantos  is  a  series  of 
episodes,  in  which  the  narrative  parts  are  in  a 
common  six-line  stanza  (ababcc),  while  the  con- 
fessions, so  to  speak,  of  the  dramatis perso7ics  vary 
in  metrical  form  according  to  their  mood.  The 
whole  poem  is  like  the  phantasmagoria  of  a  fever 
subdued  to  mathematical  restraint,  or  the  clamour 
of  mad  grief  trained  into  remorseless  logic.  In 
the  concluding  vision  of  the  "  Melencolia "  of 
Albert  Diirer,  seated  aloft  as  queen  of  that  people 
and  symbol  of  their  fate,  the  union  of  these  quali- 
ties rises  into  the  very  enthusiasm  and  sublime 
of  resignation  : 


l86  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

.  .  .  The  sense  that  every  struggle  brings  defeat 
Because  Fate  holds  no  prize  to  crown  success  ; 

That  all  the  oracles  are  dumb  or  cheat 
Because  they  have  no  secret  to  express  ; 

That  none  can  pierce  the  vast  black  veil  uncertain 

Because  there  is  no  light  beyond  the  curtain  ; 
That  all  is  vanity  and  nothingness. 

Titanic  from  her  high  throne  in  the  north, 
That  City's  sombre  Patroness  and  Queen, 

In  bronze  sublimity  she  gazes  forth 
Over  her  Capital  of  teen  and  threne, 

Over  the  river  with  its  isles  and  bridges, 

The  marsh  and  moorland,  to  the  stern  rock-ridges. 
Confronting  them  with  a  coeval  mien. 

The  moving  moon  and  stars  from  east  to  west 

Circle  before  her  in  the  sea  of  air  ; 
Shadows  and  gleams  glide  round  her  solemn  rest. 

Her  subjects  often  gaze  up  to  her  there  : 
The  strong  to  drink  new  strength  of  iron  endurance, 
The  weak  new  terrors  ;  all,  renewed  assurance 

And  confirmation  of  the  old  despair. 

No  one  knew  better  than  Thomson  himself  that 
this  is  not  the  City  of  all  the  world  ;  indeed,  the 
very  sting  of  his  grief  is  the  feeling  of  isolation 
from  the  common  lot.  Few  men  tread  those 
streets  of  denial  and  gloom  habitually,  but  many 
have  been  there  at  one  time  of  their  lives  and 
carry  with  them  always,  somewhere  hidden  from 
view,  the  badge  of  citizenship  in  that  "  sad  Fra- 
ternity." To  these,  as  well  as  to  the  few  like- 
fated  with  the  poet,  his  words  will  still  have  a 
meaning  : 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  187 

Yes,  here  and  there  some  weary  wanderer 

In  that  same  city  of  tremendous  night, 
Will  understand  the  speech,  and  feel  a  stir 

Of  fellowship  in  all  disastrous  fight ; 
"  I  suflFer  mute  and  lonely,  yet  another 
Uplifts  his  voice  to  let  me  know  a  brother 

Travels  the  same  wild  paths  though  out  of  sight." 

The  sequel  to  The  City  of  Dreadful  Night  is 
the  poem  To  Our  Ladies  of  Death,  written  in  the 
same  seven-line  stanza.  The  only  change  is  the 
substitution  of  a  single  for  a  double  rhyme  in 
the  couplet,  reducing  the  lyrical  clangour  of  the 
rhythm  to  a  more  contemplative  calm.  The  idea 
was  suggested,  as  Thomson  records,  by  "the  sub- 
lime sisterhood  of  Our  Ladies  of  Sorrow,  in  the 
Sicspiria  de  Profundis  of  De  Quincey  ' '  ;  but  for 
the  three  Sorrows  we  now  have  the  three  concep- 
tions of  Death— Our  Lady  of  Beatitudes,  the 
gracious  mother,  on  whom  the  broken  and  hope- 
less dare  not  call ;  Our  Lady  of  Annihilation, 
who  waits  with  her  scourge  "the  selfish,  fatuous, 
proud,  and  pitiless";  and,  last.  Our  Lady  of 
Oblivion,  who  gathers  to  her  breast  "the  weak, 
the  weary,  and  the  desolate,"  and  to  whom  the 
wanderer  in  the  City  of  Night  makes  his  plea  : 

Take  me,  and  lull  me  into  perfect  sleep  ; 

Down,  down,  far-hidden  in  thy  duskiest  cave  ; 
While  all  the  clamorous  years  above  me  sweep 

Unheard,  or,  like  the  voice  of  seas  that  rave 
On  far-off  coasts,  but  murmuring  o'er  my  trance, 
A  dim  vast  monotone,  that  shall  enhance 

The  restful  rapture  of  the  inviolate  grave. 


u. 


1 88  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

And  so  the  cycle  is  made  complete — from  the 
sordid  tragedy  of  the  poet's  room,  through  the- 
terrible  unforgetfulness  of  insomnia,  to  the  concep- 
tion of  all  life  as  a  City  of  Night,  and  the  despair- 
ing cry  for  the  consummation  of  oblivion.  Together 
the  four  poems  present  a  rounded  philosophy  of 
pessimism,  which  stands  quite  alone  in  English 
literature,  and  which  has,  I  believe,  no  precise 
equivalent  in  any  language. 

Pessimism  is  a  word  of  many  ambiguities,  and 
needs  defining.  It  is  commonly  applied  to  the 
Hindus,  who  in  their  better  days  were  the  least  of 
all  peoples  open  to  that  charge.  To  both  Brahmin 
and  Buddhist  the  representation  of  life  as  made  up 
wholly  of  sorrow  and  mutability  was  but  the  foil 
to  infinite  exultant  faith  ;  the  shadow  of  the  earth 
was  all  black  because  the  light  of  the  spirit  was 
so  transcendentally  pure.*  That  name  might 
seem  to  belong  more  properl}^  to  the  Greeks, 
whose  philosophy  of  life,  when  it  came  to  con- 
scious expression,  was  summed  up  in  the  maxim 
of  the  plodding,  commonplace  Theognis :  "Not 
to.be  born  is  the  best  of  all  things  for  creatures  of 
this  world,  nor  to  behold  the  beams  of  the  bright 
sun  ;  after  birth  the  best  is  to  pass  as  speedily  as 
possible  through  the  gates  of  death  and  to  lie 
shrouded  in  much  earth."     Yet  no  one  thinks  of 

1  Schopenhauer  accepted  and  attempted  to  reproduce 
the  darker  half  of  Buddhism,  but  was  blind  to  the  spirit- 
ual joys  of  that  faith.  He  is  therefore  a  thoroughly 
deceptive  interpreter  of  India. 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  189 

calling  the  Greeks  pessimistic ;  their  health  was 
too  bountiful,  the  impulse  to  live  and  enjoy  was 
too  strong.  Pessimism  is  always  individual,  and 
not  national,  and  comes  when  self-consciousness, 
unbalanced  by  spiritual  insight,  is  developed  at 
the  expense  of  irrational  instinct.  The  great  ex- 
emplar of  that  inverted  faith  in  antiquity  was  the 
Roman  Lucretius— mad  perhaps  by  the  adminis- 
tration of  a  love-potion,  mad  certainly  at  the 
thought  of  the  human  soul  caught  up  into  the 
dizzy  whirl  of  atoms  falling  together  into  fortuit- 
ous worlds  and  again  drifting  into  wild  chaos  : 

For  it  seem'd 
A  void  was  made  in  Nature;  all  her  bonds 
Crack'd  ;  and  I  saw  the  flaring  atom-streams 
And  torrents  of  her  myriad  universe, 
Ruining  along  the  illimitable  inane. 
Fly  on  to  clash  together  again,  and  make 
Another  and  another  frame  of  things 
For  ever  ;  that  was  mine,  my  dream,  I  knew  it. 

That  was  the  dream  to  which  the  science  of  his 
day  had  brought  him,  and  it  is  the  dream  to 
which  the  purely  scientific  interpretation  of  life 
must  then  and  always  bring  any  mind  that  has 
developed  to  full  self-consciousness.  It  is,  more 
particularly,  the  pessimism  that  lurks,  unawak- 
ened  or  stunned  by  miiltifarious  noise,  in  the 
background  of  our  present  eager  civilisation.  In 
Lucretius  that  vision  was  accompanied  with  a 
passionate  desire  for  the  rest  of  perfect  oblivion, 
and  with  a  more  passionate  protest  against  a  re- 


igo  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

ligion  which  would  make  the  gods  responsible  for 
this  jolting  mechanism  and  capable  of  prolonging 
man's  life  be3'ond  the  grave  to  be  ground  forever 
in  these  unresting  wheels  : 

O  genus  infelix  humanum,  talia  divis 
Cum  tribuit  facta  atque  iras  adiunxit  acerbas  1 
Quantos  turn  gemitus  ipsi  tibi,  quautaque  nobis 
Volnera,  quas  lacrimas  peperere  minoribu'  nostris  ! 

The  successor  to  Lucretius  in  modem  times 
is  another  Italian,  Leopardi,  in  whose  firmly- 
moulded  periods  and  chastened  passion  something 
of  the  great  form  and  spirit  of  the  Roman  seems 
to  have  survived.  And  the  charge  of  L,eopardi, 
if  we  omit  the  more  personal  tone  of  Christian 
times,  is  the  same  as  that  of  Lucretius  :  bewilder- 
ment at  the  meaningless  and  unresting  motion  of 
all  celestial  and  earthly  things,  with  longing  for 
the  peace,  if  not  the  beatitude,  of  death. 

It  does  not  appear  that  Thomson  was  specially 
versed  in  Lucretius,  whereas  Leopardi  was  the 
acknowledged  master  to  whom  his  City  of  Dread- 
ful Night  was  dedicated ' ;  yet  in  some  ways  he  is 

'  He  quotes  the  resonant  lines  of  Leopardi : 

"  Poi  di  tanto  adoprar,  di  tanti  moti 
D'  ogni  celeste,  ogni  terrena  cosa, 
Girando  senza  posa. 
Per  tornar  sempre  1^  donde  son  mosse ; 
Uso  alcuno,  alcun  frutto 
Indovinar  nou  so." 


JAMES   THOMSON    ("  B.    v/')  IQI 

nearer  in  tone  to  the  old  Roman  than  to  the 
modem  Italian.  More  than  one  of  Thomson's 
stanzas,  with  its  bitter  denial  of  a  God  who  could 
spin  for  his  pleasure  all  these  follies  of  creation, 
or  with  its  horror  of  a  living  eternity,  rings  like 
an  echo  of  the  Tantum  religio.  And  there  is  the 
same  poetic  fury  in  his  vision  of  infinite  motion. 
Read  the  first  of  his  prose  Phantasies,  in  which 
the  Shadow  of  Sorrow  leads  him  at  night  into  the 
thoroughfares  of  London  : 

The  continuous  thunders,  swelling,  subsiding,  re- 
surgent, the  innumerable  processions,  confound  and 
overwhelm  my  spirit,  until  as  of  old  I  cannot  believe 
myself  walking  awake  in  a  substantial  city  amongst  real 
persons. ...  As  my  eyes  fix  and  dilate  into  vision  more 
entranced  of  the  supreme  and  awful  mystery,  the  brow- 

"  Sola  nel  mondo  eterna,  a  cui  si  volve 

Ogni  creata  cosa, 

In  te,  morte,  si  posa 

Nostra  ignuda  natura  ; 

Lieta  no,  ma  sicura 

Dell'  antico  dolor.  ,  .  . 

Pero  ch'  esser  beato 

Nega  ai  mortali  e  nega  a'  morti  il  fato." 
"  In  all  this  labour,  all  these  motions  of  every  celestial, 
every  earthly  thing,   revolving  without  rest,  always  to 
return  thither  whence  they  started,  I  can  divine  no  use, 
no  fruit." 

"  In  thee  only  eternal  in  the  world,  to  whom  every 
created  thing  inclines,  in  thee,  death,  our  naked  nature 
rests  ;  not  happy,  but  secure  from  the  ancient  pain.  .  .  . 
For  to  be  blessed  is  denied  .to  mortals  and  to  the  dead  by 
fate." 


192 


SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 


brain  upon  my  eyes  expands  and  protends  into  a  vast 
shadowy  theatre  for  processions  more  multitudinous  and 
solemn.  The  lamps  withdraw  and  ascend,  and  become 
wayward  meteors  of  the  night  ;  the  night  itself  grows 
very  dark,  yet  wherever  I  gaze  I  can  discern,  seeing  by 
darkness  as  commonly  we  see  by  light ;  the  houses  re- 
cede and  swell  into  black  rock-walls  and  shapeless 
mounds  of  gloom  ;  the  long  street  is  a  broad  road  levelled 
forthright  from  world's  end  to  world's  end.  All  of  human 
kind  that  have  ever  lived,  with  all  that  are  now  living 
and  all  that  are  being  born  into  life,  all  the  members  of 
the  aeons  of  humanity,  compose  the  solemn  procession .... 

This  resolution  of  the  seemingly  stable  world 
into  an  endless  chain  of  spectral  forms  may  be 
the  vision  of  disease  ;  its  realism  is  no  doubt  the 
beginning  of  delirium  ;  yet  at  bottom  what  is  it 
more  than  the  prospect  of  universal  permutation 
that  swam  before  the  gaze  of  the  ancient  Epicu- 
rean ?  What  is  it  more  than  the  poetic  imagina- 
tion stung  to  frenzy  by  the  scientific  conception 
of  universal  motion?  Or  in  what  does  it  diflFer 
from  the  vast  processions  that  thronged  before 
the  eye  of  Walt  Whitman  and  that,  but  for  his 
exuberant  animalism,  would  have  troubled  our 
optimist  with  the  same  repulsion  of  fear  ?  This 
jT^  is  the  ground  which  pessimism  seeks  always  for 
its  building. 

Yet  I  would  not  imply  that  Thomson  is  in  all 

respects  akin  to  Lucretius,  any  more  than  I  would 

equal  him  in  renown  to  that  mighty  poet.     The 

^'  magnificent  audacity   is  not  here,    the    Roman 

^  courage  to  deny  defeat,  the  supreme  confidence 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.    V.")  1 93 

in  the  power  of  the  human  will  to  lay  violent 
hold  upon  happiness  if  once  the  benumbing 
chains  of  superstition  were  broken.  Nor  must 
he  be  confounded  with  Leopardi.  He  lacks  the 
intense  patriotism  which  taught  the  Italian  to 
sink  his  personal  grievance  against  Fate  in  in- 
dignation over  the  long  miseries  of  his  people; 
above  all,  he  lacks  that  deeper  insight  which 
once  or  twice  lifts  Leopardi  out  of  pessimism  into 
mystic  self-surrender.  There  may  be  here  and 
there  something  like  acquiescence  in  his  thought 
of  resolution  after  death  into  the  forces  of  creative 
Nature ' ;  but  there  is  in  all  his  works  nothing 
that  corresponds  to  Leopardi's  brief  and  perfect 
rhapsody,  VLiftnito,  with  its  haunting  conclusion: 

E  il  naufragar  m'  ^  dolce  in  questo  mare. 

One  is  never  permitted  quite  to  escape  the  nar- 
rower, personal  outlook  in  Thomson,  or  to  forget 
that  only  his  peculiar  disabilities  prevent  him 
from  disavowing  his  philosophy  in  the  common 
cares  and  sympathies  of  mankind : 

'  As    in    the   concluding  stanzas   of  Our  Ladies   of 
Death: 

"  But  if  this  cannot  be,  no  less  I  cry. 

Come,  lead  me  with  thy  terrorless  control 
Down  to  our  Mother's  bosom,  there  to  die 

By  abdication  of  my  separate  soul : 
So  shall  this  single,  self-impelling  piece 
Of  mechanism  from  lone  labour  cease. 

Resolving  into  union  with  the  Whole."  .  .. 

13 


194  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

This  chance  was  never  oflFered  me  before  ; 

For  me  the  infinite  Past  is  blank  and  dumb: 
This  chance  recurreth  never,  nevermore  ; 

Blank,  blank  for  me  the  infinite  To-come. 

And  this  sole  chance  was  frustrate  from  my  birth, 
A  mockery,  a  delusion  ;  and  my  breath 

Of  noble  human  life  upon  the  earth 

So  racks  me  that  I  sigh  for  senseless  death. 

Lucretius  may  be  said  to  speak  for  rebellious 
mankind,  Leopardi  for  the  patriot  who  merges 
his  personal  grievance  in  despondency  over  his 
nation,  Thomson  for  the  individual  who  feels 
himself  cut  off  by  circumstances  from  the  com- 
mon illusion  of  happiness.  Of  all  three  the  pes- 
simism is  connected  with  the  notion  of  man  as  an 
integral  part  of  nature,  subject  wholly  to  natural 
law,  and  with  the  terror  which  arises  when  a 
heightened  self-consciousness,  without  the  stay  of 
healthy  animal  instincts,  finds  itself  confronted 
by  the  vision  of  all-involving  motion  and  per- 
mutation. So  necessary  for  the  soul  is  some 
place  of  stability  outside  of  nature's  vortex  that, 
if  no  other  peace  is  allowed,  it  will  make  its  ac- 
count with  death  : 

As  if  a  Being,  God  or  Fiend,  could  reign. 

At  once  so  wicked,  foolish,  and  insane. 

As  to  produce  men  when  He  might  refrain  ! 

The  world  rolls  round  for  ever  like  a  mill ; 
It  grinds  out  death  and  life  and  good  and  ill ; 
It  has  no  purpose,  heart  or  mind  or  will. 


JAMES    THOMSON    ("  B.  V.")  I95 

While  air  of  Space  aud  Time's  full  river  flow 
The  mill  must  blindly  whirl  unresting  so: 
It  may  be  wearing  out,  but  who  can  know  ? 

Man  might  know  one  thing  were  his  sight  less  dim  ; 
That  it  whirls  not  to  suit  his  petty  whim, 
That  it  is  quite  indiff"erent  to  him. 

Nay,  does  it  treat  him  harshly  as  he  saith? 
It  grinds  him  some  slow  years  of  bitter  breath, 
Then  grinds  him  back  into  eternal  death. 


CHESTERFIEI.D 

A  life  of  I/)rd  Chesterfield  '  devoted  almost  ex- 
clusively to  the  political  career  of  that  arbiter  of 
elegancies  might  seem  to  promise  an  oddl}'^  dis- 
torted portrait.  Yet  we  may  find  our  profit  in 
Mr.  Craig's  well-meant,  if  carelessly  composed, 
work.  It  will  at  least  do  something  to  modify 
the  contemptuous  ignorance  which  passes  com- 
monly for  a  judgment  of  his  lordship,  and  which, 
for  one  reason  or  another,  has  overtaken  most 
of  the  men  who  fought  in  the  Opposition  to  that 
right  British  master,  Sir  Robert  Walpole.  And 
a  sober  consideration  of  his  career  brings  also  a 
new  element  into  our  opinion  of  his  Letters.  We 
are  likely  to  look  with  more  lenience  on  his 
reiterated  preaching  of  politeness  and  superficial 
address  when  we  remember  that  in  active  life  he 
himself  played  an  honourable  and  manly  part. 
The  second  member  of  his  favourite  motto,  Suav- 
iter  in  viodo,  fortiterin  re,  assumes  a  just  propor- 
tion to  the  first  by  a  comparison  of  his  acts  with 
his  words. 

Philip   Dormer  Stanhope,   the  fourth  Earl  of 

»  Life  of  Lord  Chesterfield.  An  Account  of  the  Ances- 
try, Personal  Character,  and  Public  Services  of  the  Fourth 
Earl  of  Chesterfield.  By  W.  H.  Craig.  New  York  :  John 
Lane  Co.     1907. 

196 


CHESTERFIELD  1 97 

Chesterfield,  came  of  a  distinguished  house,  so 
ancient  that  he  could  safely  ridicule  the  vanity  of 
birth  by  setting  up  portraits  of  Adam  and  Eve  de 
Stanhope  in  his  family  gallery,  and  by  calling  it, 
in  one  of  his  World  papers,  "  the  child  of  Pride 
and  Folly,  coupled  together  by  that  industrious 
pander  Self-love."  He  was  born  in  St.  James's 
Square,  London,  in  1694.  His  father,  the  third 
Earl,  seems  to  have  been  more  distinguished  by 
stubbornness  than  any  other  quality  ;  being  a 
strong  Jacobite,  he  punished  his  heir's  Hanover- 
ian tendencies  by  cutting  his  allowance  down  to 
five  hundred  pounds  a  year,  and,  for  his  other 
traits,  we  may  suppose  that  Swift  exaggerated  a 
little  when  he  wrote  :  "  If  it  be  old  Chesterfield, 
I  have  heard  he  was  the  greatest  knave  in  Eng- 
land." The  son  lived  not  at  home,  but  with  his 
maternal  grandmother,  the  excellent  Marchioness 
of  Halifax,'  who  indulged  his  bent  and  kept  him 
out  of  school  until,  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  he  was 
entered  at  Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge.  Here  ap- 
parently he  combined  the  studious  and  the  rakish 
life,  with  a  predominance  of  the  former.  At  any 
rate,  he  steeped  himself  in  the  Classics,  and  began 
that  discipline  in  the  precise  use  of  language 
which  made  him  one  of  the  first  masters  of  Eng- 

It  has  been  remarked  that  in  intellect  and  tempera- 
ment he  was  more  of  a  Savile  than  a  Stanhope,  and 
a  comparison  of  his  writings  with  those  of  his  grand- 
father, the  first  Marquis  of  Halifax,  fully  confirms  the 
observation . 


198  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

lisli.  His  method  of  study  he  explained  later  to 
his  son :  "So  long  ago  as  when  I  was  at  Cam- 
bridge, whenever  I  read  pieces  of  eloquence  (and 
indeed  they  were  my  principal  study),  whether 
ancient  or  modern,  I  used  to  write  down  the  shin- 
ing passages,  and  then  translate  them  as  well  and 
as  elegantly  as  ever  I  could  ;  if  Latin  or  French, 
into  English  ;  if  English,  into  French."  At  nine- 
teen he  left  the  university,  if  we  may  believe  his 
own  words,  as  precious  a  pedant  as  ever  went 
up  to  I/3ndon  :  when  he  talked  best,  he  talked 
Horace ;  his  wit  was  to  quote  Martial,  and  his 
notion  of  a  fine  gentleman  to  follow  Ovid.  He 
never  forgave  the  university  for  sending  him  out 
with  this  tincture  of  scholasticism ,  and  his  unre- 
lenting rancour  inclines  one  to  believe  that  his 
accounts  of  a  blundering  start  in  society  are  not  a 
commonplace  fiction  for  pointing  a  moral.  And 
indeed,  as  his  perfected  manners  were  the  polish 
of  a  sensitive  egotism,  it  is  natural  that  his  en- 
trance upon  the  world  should  have  been  marked  by 
a  bashful  self-consciousness.  He  would  not  permit 
'  his  son  to  go  either  to  Cambridge  or  Oxford. 
His  letters  speak  of  the  universities  always  with 
hatred  and  contempt,  and  one  of  his  journal- 
istic portraits  of  a  boor  repeats  the  theme  :  "  As 
he  had  resided  long  in  college,  he  had  contracted 
all  the  habits,  prejudices,  the  laziness,  the  soak- 
ing, the  pride,  and  the  pedantry  of  a  cloister, 
which  after  a  certain  time  are  never  to  be  rubbed 
off." 


CHESTERFIELD  1 99 

It  need  not  be  said  that  Chesterfield  soon  rubbed 
off  his  viauvaise  honte  by  contact  with  the  world. 
For  some  years  he  served  in  the  lower  house  of 
Parliament  with  indifferent  success.     At  the  age 
of  thirty-one  he  succeeded  to  the  earldom  by  the 
death  of  his  father,  and  began  his  real  career, 
being  better  fitted  by  temperament  and  education 
for  influence  among  the  L,ords  than  among  the 
Commons.     Two  periods  of  his  political  activity 
stand  out  prominently  :  his  mission  as  ambassador 
to  The  Hague  from  1728  to  1732,  and  his  vice- 
royalty  of  Ireland  in   1745-46  ;   in  both  which 
ofiices  he  showed  undoubted  ability.      At  The 
Hague,  where  the  tangled  dynastic  relations  of 
Europe  were   debated,    he    kept    his    head    and 
maintained  the  honour  of  England — and  no  man 
could  do  more.     To  Ireland  he  gave  for  eight 
memorable  months  a  happy  government,  showing 
a  peculiar  sympathy  for  that  tormented  people. 
Some  of  his  best-known  witticisms  come  from 
Dublin,  and  his  wit,  together  with  his  firm  toler- 
ance, was  an  important  element  in  his  success. 
"  I  would  much  rather,"  he  once  said,  "be  dis- 
tinguished and  remembered  by  the  name  of  the 
Irish  Lord-Lieidenant  than  by  that  of  Lord-Lieu- 
tenant of  Ireland."     Again,  at  a  critical  moment, 
when  the  Castle  officials  brought  him  word  in  the 
morning  that  "the  people   of  Connaught  were 
actually  rising,"  he  first  gravely  consulted  his 
watch  and  then  replied  with  composure  :  "Well, 
it  is  nine  o'clock,  and  certainly  time  for  them  to 


200  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

rise;  I  therefore  believe  your  news  to  be  true." 
Nor  did  lie  lose  his  interest  in  the  people  after  his 
return.  Throughout  his  later  correspondence 
with  Irish  friends  he  was  constant  in  his  support  of 
the  paper  and  linen  manufactures,  by  which  he 
hoped  the  country  could  be  brought  to  efficient 
independence. 

In  the  interval  between  his  residence  at  The 
Hague  and  in  Dublin  he  was,  until  Walpole's 
downfall  in  1742,  a  member  of  the  cabal  which 
led  the  Opposition  and  gave  hostility  to  that  min- 
ister the  name  of  Patriotism.  Chesterfield's  part 
in  the  political  game  was  an  active,  but  not  the 
leading,  one.  He  had  neither  the  vinilent  pen 
nor  the  personal  weight  of  Bolingbroke  ;  he  could 
not  intrigue  with  the  trimming  Pulteney,  or  con- 
tend against  the  domineering,  gusty  Carteret ;  but 
he  wrote  and  spoke  much,  and  took  his  part  in 
the  harrying  of  the  great  Parliamentary  boar. 
After  his  return  from  Ireland,  he  was  for  a  while 
Secretary  of  State  in  the  Broad-bottom  ministry 
of  the  Pelhams,  but  gradually  dropped  out  of  the 
arena  into  the  quiet  of  a  valetudinary  old  age 
that  fluttered  between  the  magnificent  library  of 
Chesterfield  House  in  South  Audley  Street  and 
his  gardens  and  Babiole  at  Blackheath.  "  I  am 
now,  for  the  first  time  in  my  life,"  he  writes  to  an 
old  friend  in  1753,  "impatient  for  the  summer, 
that  I  may  go  and  hide  myself  at  Blackheath  and 
converse  with  my  vegetables  d' egal  h  igal,  which 
is  all  that  a  deaf  man  can  pretend  to.  .  .  .  The 


CHESTERFIELD  20I 

place  agrees  with  my  health  and  becomes  my 
present  situation.  It  employs  my  eyes,  my  own 
legs,  and  my  horse's  agreeably  without  having 
any  demand  upon  my  ears,  so  that  I  almost  forget 
sometimes  I  have  lost  them."  As  for  the  library 
in  his  city  house,  it  was  one  of  the  spectacles  of 
I^ondon,  and  still  exists,  Httle  changed.  In  1845, 
a  writer  in  the  Quarterly  Review  thus  described, 

What  [Chesterfield]  boasted  of  as  "  the  finest  room  in 
London" — and  perhaps  even  now  it  remains  unsur- 
passed— his  spacious  and  beautiful  library,  looking  on 
the  finest  private  garden  in  London.  The  walls  are 
covered  half-way  up  with  rich  and  classical  stores  of 
literature  ;  above  the  cases  are,  in  close  series,  the  por- 
traits of  eminent  authors,  French  and  English,  with 
most  of  whom  he  had  conversed.  Over  these  and  imme- 
diately under  the  massive  cornice,  extend  all  round  in 
foot-long  capitals  the  Horatian  lines  : 

Nunc  veterum  libris.    Nunc  somno  et  inertibus  horis. 
Ducere  solicitte  jucunda  oblivia  vitae. 

On  the  mantelpiece  and  cabinets  stand  busts  of  old 
orators,  interspersed  with  voluptuous  vases  and  bronzes, 
antique  or  Italian,  and  airy  statuettes  in  marble  or 
alabaster  of  nude  or  semi-nude  opera  nymphs. 

Stoic  we  may  believe  the  oblivion  of  the  half- 
cloistered  wit,  deaf  and  broken  in  health,  to  have 
been,  h^x\.  joaind  never.  "  Phj'sical  ills,"  he 
writes,  '*  are  the  taxes  laid  upon  this  wretched 
life;  some  are  taxed  higher,  and  some  lower,  but 
all  pay  something.  My  philosophy  teaches  me 
to  reflect  how  much  higher,  rather  than  how 
much  lower,  I  might  have  been  taxed."     And 


202  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

again:  "  I  read  a  good  deal,  and  vary  occasion- 
ally my  dead  company.     I  converse  with  grave 
folios  in  the  morning,  while  my  head  is  clearest 
and  my  attention  strongest ;  I  take  up  less  severe 
quartos  after  dinner;  and  at  night  I  choose  the 
mixed  company  and  amusing  chit-chat  of  octavos 
and  duodecimos.    Je  tire  parti  de  tout  ce  qxce  je 
puis;  that  is  my  philosophy  ;  and  I  mitigate,  as 
much  as  I  can,  my  physical  ills  by  diverting  my 
attention  to   other  objects."      It  is  the   savoir 
vieillir,  the  bland  resignation  of  the  man  of  the 
world,  such  as  we  meet  in  page  after  page  of 
the  letters  of  Horace  Walpole,  like  Chesterfield, 
old  and  gouty.     "  Visions,"  wrote  Walpole  "  are 
the  consolation  of  life ;  it  is  wise  to  indulge  them, 
unless  one  builds  on   them  as  realities.      Our 
dreams  are  almost  at  an  end !     Mine  are  mixed 
with  pain ;  yet  I  think  it  does  not  make  me  peev- 
ish.    I  accept  with  thankfulness  every  hour  in 
which  I  do  not  suffer.     I  am  not  impatient  for 
the  moment  that  will  terminate  both  anguish  and 
cheerfulness,  and  I  endeavour  to  form  my  mind 
to   resigning   the  first  with   gratitude,   and    the 
latter  with  submission. ' '    The  visions  of  Chester- 
field, we  may  fancy,  were  more  solid  than  those 
of  the  epicure  of  Strawberry  Hill.     He  had  seen 
the  great  world,  and  knew  men  and  manners. 
From  those  perpetual  friends,  his  books,  he  could 
turn  to  living  memories  of  Mr.  Addison  and  Mr. 
Pope,  in  whose  company,  as  he  wrote,  he  used  to 
feel  in  society  as  much  above  himself  as  if  he  had 


CHESTERFIELD  203 

been  with  all  the  princes  in  Europe.  The  quarrels 
and  reconciliations  of  those  mighty  wits,  no  doubt, 
he  reflected  upon  much,  as  also  upon  the  coarser 
battles  of  the  politicians,  including  the  relentless 
Lord  Bolingbroke.  INIuch,  too,  he  must  have 
thought  of  the  flutter  of  more  effeminate  society, 
and  of  his  own  reputation  as  the  glass  of  form, 
given  so  grudgingly  by  his  rivals,  won  with  such 
pains  to  himself.  There  was  a  world  of  recollec- 
tions to  occupy  the  gouty  and  somewhat  lonely 
old  gentleman  in  his  chair. 

We  can  almost  see  him  in  his  library  by  his 
garden  window,  a  frail  and  uncomely  figure,  the 
eyes,  beneath  the  bushy  high-arched  brows,  large 
and  touched  with  pain;  the  mouth  small  and 
lifted  in  a  half-kindly,  half-cynical  smile;  the 
chin  heavy,  but  rounded  to  a  point.  So  Gains- 
borough painted  him,  and  so  the  face  appears, 
not  without  nobility  and  power,  in  most  of  the 
memoirs  of  the  day.  But  the  voice  was  shrill 
and  the  body  curiously  awkward.  Plain-speaking 
George  II.  calls  him  a  "  dwarf  baboon,"  and 
handsome  Hervey,  Pope's  "white  curd  of  ass's 
milk,"  who  has  no  love  for  his  person  or  respect 
for  his  morals,  will  not  even  allow  dignity  to  the 
countenance : 

With  a  person  as  disagreeable  as  it  was  possible  for  a 
human  figure  to  be  without  being  deformed,  he  afiFected 
following  many  women  of  the  first  beauty  and  the  most 
in  fashion  ;  and,  if  you  would  have  taken  his  word  for 
it,  not  without  success ;  whilst  in  fact  and  in  truth  he 


204  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

never  gained  any  one  above  the  venal  rank  of  those 
whom  an  Adonis  or  a  Vulcan  might  be  equally  well 
with,  for  an  equal  sum  of  money.'  He  was  very  short, 
disproportioned,  thick,  and  clumsily  made  ;  had  a  broad 
[it  is  narrow  in  the  portraits],  rough-featured,  ugly  face, 
with  black  teeth  [he  alludes  himself  to  this  defect],  and 
a  head  big  enough  for  a  Polyphemus.  One  Ben  Ashurst, 
who  said  few  good  things,  though  admired  for  many, 
told  Lord  Chesterfield  once  that  he  was  like  a  stunted 
giant — which  was  a  humorous  idea  and  really  apposite. 
Such  a  thing  would  disconcert  Lord  Chesterfield  as  much 
as  it  would  have  done  anybody  who  had  neither  his  wit 
nor  his  assurance  on  other  occasions  ;  for  though  he 
could  attack  vigorously,  he  could  defend  but  weakly,  his 
quickness  never  showing  itself  in  reply,  any  more  than 
his  understanding  in  argument. 

'  The  same  insinuation  may  be  found  elsewhere.  But 
Hervej'  was,  perhaps,  a  little  embittered  by  the  some- 
what scandalous  ballad  to  his  lovely  wife,  attributed 
conjointly  to  the  Earls  of  Chesterfield  and  Bath  : 

"The  Muses,  quite  jaded  with  rhyming, 
To  Molly  Mogg  bid  a  farewell ; 
But  renew  their  sweet  melody,  chiming 
To  the  name  of  dear  Molly  Lepel ! 

"  Bright  Venus  yet  never  saw  bedded 
So  perfect  a  beau  and  a  belle. 
As  when  Hervey  the  handsome  was  wedded 
To  the  beautiful  Molly  Lepel !  "  .  .  . 

Complimentary  enough,  but  the  sting  comes  later. 
Chesterfield's  marriage  to  Melusina  de  Schulemburg, 
daughter  of  George  I.  and  the  Duchess  of  Kendall, 
neither  young  nor  attractive,  but  rich,  was  as  prosaic  as 
possible,  but  there  is  a  hint  of  romance  in  the  story  of 
Fanny  Shirley,  whom  in  his  younger  years  he  saw 
enough  of  at  Twickenham  to  start  the  sly  tongue  of 
gossip  a-wagging.      Charles  Hanbury  Williams,   the  li- 


CHESTERFIELD  205 

Lord  Hervey's  report  of  this  encounter  with 
Ben  Ashurst  might  be  used  as  a  simile  of  the 
Parliamentary  contest  between  Chesterfield  and 
Sir  Robert.  And  in  other  respects  the  descrip- 
tion is  something  more  than  gossip;  it  helps 
to  explain  the  exaggerated  insistence  upon  form 
and  manner  in  a  man  who  could  leave  nothing 
to  nature,  but  must  win  his  reputation  entirely 
by  art.  "We  must  remember  always  that  the 
great  Earl,  in  writing  to  an  ungainly  son,  had 
had    also   his   own   ungainliness   to    overcome. 

censed  satirist  of  society,  put  them  into  limping 
verse  : 

"  Says  Lovel — There  were  Chesterfield  and  Fanny, 
In  that  eternal  whisper  which  begun 
Ten  years  ago,  and  never  will  be  done." 

To  Chesterfield  was  accredited  (though  it  was  more 
likely  from  the  hand  of  Thomas  Phillips)  the  ballad 
upon  her,  "  When  Fanny,  blooming  fair,"  which  Hor- 
ace Walpole  had  parodied : 

"  Here  Fanny,  '  ever  blooming  fair,' 
Ejaculates  the  graceful  prayer  ; 
And  'scaped  from  sense,  with  nonsense  smit, 
For  Whitfield's  cant  leaves  Stanhope's  wit." 

There  are  several  allusions  to  her  pitiable  old  age  in 
Walpole's  Letters:  "'Fanny,  blooming  fair,'  died  yes- 
terday of  a  stroke  of  palsy.  She  had  lost  her  memory 
for  some  years,  and  remembered  nothing  but  her  beauty 
and  not  her  Methodism.  Being  confined  with  only  ser- 
vants, she  was  continually  lamenting, '  I  to  be  abandoned 
that  all  the  world  used  to  adore ! '  She  was  seventy- 
two."— Such  strange  gleams  of  pathos  shine  through  the 
wit  of  that  period. 


2o6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

And  we  must  remember,  too,  that  his  passion- 
ate interest  in  the  son's  ambition  arose  in  part 
from  a  feeling  that  his  own  career  had  fallen 
short  of  what  his  powers  promised.  He  had 
held  office  and  had  won  respect  as  a  speaker 
in  Parliament,  yet  his  actual  weight  in  the 
Government,  or  against  it,  was  never  equal  to 
his  capabilities ;  and  of  this  he  seems  to  have 
been  painfully  conscious.  We  may  give  various 
reasons  for  this  partial  thwarting  of  his  hopes, 
but  the  truth  probably  lies  in  Hervey's  caustic 
words : 

Lord  Chesterfield  was  allowed  by  everybody  to  have 
more  conversible  entertaiuing  table-wit  than  any  man 
of  bis  time  ;  his  propensity  to  ridicule,  in  which  he  in- 
dulged himself  with  infinite  humour  and  no  distinction, 
and  with  inexhaustible  spirits  and  no  discretion,  made 
him  sought  and  feared,  liked  and  not  loved,  by  most  of 
his  acquaintance  ;  no  sex,  no  relation,  no  rank,  no  power, 
no  profession,  no  friendship,  no  obligation  was  a  shield 
from  those  pointed,  glittering  weapons,  that  seemed  to 
shine  only  to  a  stander-by,  but  cut  deep  in  those  they 
touched.  ...  I  remember  two  lines  in  a  satire  of 
Boileau's  that  fit  him  exactly: 

Mais  c'est  un  petit  fou  qui  se  croit  tout  per  mis, 
Et  qui  pour  un  bon  mot  va  perdre  vingt  amis. 

And  as  his  lordship,  for  want  of  principle,  often  sacrificed 
his  character  to  his  interest,  so  by  these  means  he  as 
often,  for  want  of  prudence,  sacrificed  his  interest  to  his 
vanity.' 

'  Compare  Burnet's  portrait  of  Halifax:  "He  was  a 
man  of  a  quiet  and  ready  wit :    full  of  life  and  very 


CHESTERFIELD 


207 


The  fact  is  his  lordship  was  not  much  liked 
or  trusted.  From  the  King  down  he  made  men 
feel  the  inferiority  of  their  minds,  and  this,  in 
an  age  when  politics  were  so  completely  per- 
sonal, was  in  itself  enough  to  ruin  him.  And, 
besides,  he  did  not  play  the  game.  Bribery  and 
corruption  were  the  tools  of  administration  used 
notoriously  by  Walpole,  as  they  were  in  turn 
by  the  protesting  Patriots ;  now  Chesterfield 
would  not  take  a  bribe,  and  is  one  of  the  few 
men  who  came  out  of  public  life  with  clean 
hands.  So  much  was  to  his  honour  and  not 
against  his  influence;  but  he  had  an  uncom- 
fortable way  of  failing  to  see  that  other  men 
might  pocket  their  rewards  and  still  be  honest 
within  the  acknowledged  rules  of  the  sport. 
He  lacked  apparently  the  first  requisite  of  po- 
litical savoir  vivre^  and  in  this  he  was  coupled 
with  Lord  Carteret :  "  They  both  of  them,  too, 
treated  all  principles  of  honesty  and  integrity 
with  such  open  contempt  that  they  seemed  to 
think  the  appearance  of  those  qualities  would 
be  of  as  little  use  to  them  as  the  reality,  which 

pleasant ;  much  turned  to  satire.  He  let  his  wit  run 
much  on  matters  of  religion,  so  that  he  passed  for  a  bold 
and  determined  atheist ;  though  he  often  protested  to  me 
he  was  not  one ;  said  he  believed  there  was  not  one  in 
the  world.  .  .  .  The  liveliness  of  his  imagination  was 
always  too  hard  for  his  judgment.  A  severe  jest  was 
preferred  bj'  him  to  all  arguments  whatsoever."  Lord 
Dartmouth  gives  him  the  same  character. 


2o8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

must  certainly  be  impolitic,  since  always  to 
ridicule  those  who  are  swayed  by  such  prin- 
ciples was  telling  all  their  acquaintance,  'If  you 
do  not  behave  to  me  like  knaves,  I  shall  either 
distrust  you  as  hypocrites  or  laugh  at  you  as 
fools.'  "  After  following  Chesterfield's  career  in 
all  its  details  and  allowing  credit  to  his  incor- 
ruptibility and  his  occasional  eflSciency,  one 
still  returns,  unfairly  it  may  be,  to  the  judg- 
ment of  Horace  Walpole  on  reading  his  I^etters : 
"  Yet  in  all  that  great  character  what  was  there 
worth  remembering  but  his  bons  mots  ?  .  .  . 
from  politics  he  rather  escaped  well,  than  suc- 
ceeded by  them  : "  —  so  dangerous  is  the  repu- 
tation for  wit. 

As  a  maker  of  epigrams,  rather  than  as  a 
statesman,  he  moves  through  the  records  of  the 
age,  and  it  should  seem  that  people  looked  for 
his  inevitable  witticism  at  every  occurrence  in 
the  government  or  society.  So  Mrs.  Montagu 
sends  to  her  husband  "an  admirable  bon  mot 
of  Lord  Chesterfield's"  on  the  perplexities  of 
George  III.  just  come  to  the  throne  :  "He  said 
the  King  was  in  doubt  whether  he  should  burn 
Scotch  coal  [Bute],  Pitt  coal,  or  Newcastle  coal." 
And  Horace  Walpole,  as  part  of  the  regular 
news  of  the  day,  writes  to  Horace  Mann,  "two 
new  bon  mots  of  his  lordship  much  repeated, 
better  than  his  ordinary."  At  another  time, 
after  relating  an  outrageously  wicked  retort  to 
Mrs.  Ann  Pitt,  Chatham's  sister,  he  breaks  out: 


CHESTERFIELD  209 

"  What  gaiety  and  spirit  at   seventy-five,   and 
how  prettily  expressed  !     It  contains  the  cheer- 
fulness of  the  wars  of  the  Fronde  in  France." 
On   one   occasion    I^ord   Chesterfield    left    the 
retirement  of  his  library  and  gardens,  and  what 
he  then  accomplished  was  the  proudest  achieve- 
ment of  his  life.      In   1582   Gregory  XIII.  had 
reformed  the  calendar,  and  all  the  countries  of 
Europe,  except   England,   Russia,  and  Sweden, 
had  adopted  the  New  Style.     As  a  consequence, 
there  were  in  Chesterfield's  day  two  different 
methods  of  reckoning   dates,  an   inconvenience 
which  had  been  impressed  upon  him  by  the  dif- 
ficulties of  correspondence  during  his  embassy  to 
The  Hague.      In  175 1  he  had  a  bill  introduced 
in   Parliament   by  which    the    year  henceforth 
should   begin   the   ist  January,   instead  of  the 
25th    March,    and   the   eleven   superfluous   days 
should  be  voided  by  calling  the  3d  September, 
1752,    the    14th.      Superstition,    habit,    and   the 
embarrassment  of  altering  contract  dates  com- 
bined to  oppose  the  bill,  but  with  the  aid  of 
Henry  Pelham,  who  was  prime  minister,  and  of 
the  Lord  Chancellor  Macclesfield,  it  was  passed 
in  the  end.     He  was  fond  of  repeating  the  story 
of  the  triumph  to  his  son  in  that  vein  of  didactic 
modesty  so  peculiarly  his  own.    March  18,  O.  S., 
1 75 1,  he  wrote  : 

I  was  to  bring  in  this  bill,  whicli  was  necessarily  com- 
posed of  law  jargon  and  astronomical  calculations,  to  both 
of  which  I  am  an  utter  stranger.     However,  it  was  abso- 
14 


2IO  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

lutely  necessary  to  make  the  House  of  Lords  think  that  I 
knew  something  of  the  matter,  and  also  to  make  them 
believe  that  they  knew  something  of  it  themselves,  which 
they  do  not.  For  my  own  part,  I  could  just  as  soon  have 
talked  Celtic  or  Sclavonian  to  them  as  astronomy,  and 
they  would  have  understood  me  full  as  well;  so  I  resolved 
to  do  better  than  speak  to  the  purpose,  and  to  please  in- 
stead of  informing  them.  I  gave  them,  therefore,  only 
an  historical  account  of  calendars,  from  the  Egyptian 
down  to  the  Gregorian,  amusing  them  now  and  then  with 
little  episodes ;  but  I  was  particularly  attentive  to  the 
choice  of  my  words,  to  the  harmony  and  roundness  of 
my  periods,  to  my  elocution,  to  my  action.  This  suc- 
ceeded, and  ever  will  succeed  :  they  thought  I  informed, 
because  I  pleased  them  ;  and  many  of  them  said  that  I 
had  made  the  whole  very  clear  to  them,  when,  God 
knows,  I  had  not  even  attempted  it.  Lord  Macclesfield, 
who  had  the  greatest  share  in  forming  the  bill,  and  who 
is  one  of  the  greatest  mathematicians  and  astronomers  in 
Europe,  spoke  afterwards  with  infinite  knowledge  and  all 
the  clearness  that  so  intricate  a  matter  would  admit  of; 
but  as  his  words,  his  periods,  and  his  utterance,  were  not 
near  so  good  as  mine,  the  preference  was  most  unani- 
mously, though  most  unjustly,  given  to  me. 

After  this  incursion  into  public  life,  he  returned 
to  valetudinarian  ways,  preparing  himself  with 
tranquil  stoicism  for  the  end,  ever  ready  with  a 
jest  or  a  sententious  fling  at  destiny.  He  reminds 
one  of  Franklin,  without  Franklin's  great  body 
and  without  his  imperturbability.  ' '  Not  so  loud," 
he  replied  to  one  who  accosted  him  in  the  street 
walking  with  a  friend.  '  *  The  fact  is  that  Tyrawley 
and  I  have  been  dead  these  two  years,  only  we 
don't  wish  it  to  be  generally  known."     It  is  like 


CHESTERFIELD  211 

Franklin's  "  I  seem  to  have  intruded  myself  into 
the  company  of  posterity,  when  I  ought  to  have 
been  abed  and  asleep."  Eight  years  before  his 
death  he  was  in  a  mood  to  write  to  his  son  :  "  I 
feel  the  beginning  of  the  autumn,  which  is  already 
very  cold  ;  the  leaves  are  withered,  fall  apace, 
and  seem  to  intimate  that  I  must  follow  them  ; 
which  I  shall  do  without  reluctance,  being  ex- 
tremely weary  of  this  silly  world."  Ever>'body 
knows  his  last  words — they  are  classic — spoken 
when  the  valet  de  chambre  opened  the  curtains  of 
his  bed  and  announced  his  old  and  well-tried 
friend:  "  Give  Dayrolles  a  chair."  That  act  of 
formal  courtesy  should  be  added  to  the  illustra- 
tions of  Pope's  ruling  passion  strong  in  death. 

He  died  24  March,  1773,  leaving  the  tradition 
of  his  wit  to  be  taken  up  by  such  lesser  men  as 
George  Selwyn,  Richard  Brinsley  Sheridan,  and 
Sydney  Smith. 

I/)rd  Chesterfield's  letters  are  divided  into  two 
distinct  collections,  those  to  various  correspondents 
on  Political  and  Miscellaneous  topics  and  those 
To  his  Son  on  Education.  They  are  alike  in  the 
dry  light,  the  almost  pitiless  clarity  of  intelli- 
gence, which  they  throw  upon  all  the  affairs  of 
life,  but  in  other  respects  they  are  naturally  di- 
verse. One  is  impressed  in  the  general  collection 
by  the  shrewd  understanding  of  men  and  move- 
ments which  again  and  again  predicts  the  shifting 
political  combinations  of  the  age.  Nor  did  he 
fail  to  observe  the  larger  currents  of  national  des- 


212  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

tiny,  as  in  his  insight  into  the  condition  of  France, 
the  clearest  expression  of  which  occurs,  however, 
in  a  letter  to  his  son  :  "  In  short,  all  the  symptoms 
which  I  have  ever  met  with  in  history  previous 
to  great  changes  and  revolutions  in  government, 
now  exist  and  daily  increase  in  France."     With 
this  insight  goes  an  irresistible  impulse  to  eluci- 
date and  advise;  there  is,  in  fact,  just  a  touch  of 
the  schoolmaster,  strangely  compounded  with  the 
fine  gentleman,  in  his  inveterate  didacticism.     In 
his  friendships  generally,  few  but  enduring,  he 
maintains  a  kind  of  discreet  enthusiasm,  rising 
in  the  correspondence  with  one  or  two   French 
ladies  to  a  really  exquisite  gallantry.     Was  ever 
a  prettier  compliment  turned  than  that  by  which 
he  made  his  desire  to  conform  his  dates  to  those 
of  Madame  de  Monconseil  the  cause  of  reforming 
the  British  calendar  ?   The  whole  letter  (i  i  Avril, 
V.  S.,  1 751)  should  be  read  in  connection  with 
that  to  his  son  a  month  earlier,  to  see  with  what 
refinement  of  address  he  turns  the  same  notable 
act  to  the  uses  of  pedagogy  and  courtesy.     There 
is  the  proud  self-effacement  of  the  good  teacher  in 
the  one,  as  of  the  courtly  gentleman  in  the  other  : 
' '  Mais  enfin  voila  votre  style  etabli  ici.     Voyez 
par  la  comment  le  public  ignore  presque  toujours 
les  veritables  causes  des  evenements  ;   car  il  ne 
vous  soupgonne  pas  d'entrer  pour  quelque  chose 
dans  celui-ci." 

But  it  is  the  long  series  of  letters  to  his  son  that 
have  made  the  name  of  Chesterfield  to  be  a  living 


CHESTERFIELD  213 

symbol.     No  legitimate  children  were   born   to 
him,  but  while  at  The  Hague  he  had  formed  a 
liaison  with  a  certain  Madame  du  Bouchet,  gov- 
erness in  a  wealthy  Dutch  family,  who  followed 
him  to  England  and  lived  there  quietly  on  an 
allowance  during  his  life.      In   1732,  their  son, 
Philip  Stanhope,  was  born.     In  the  care  of  this 
boy  the  father  and  the  pedagogue  combined  in 
Chesterfield  to  produce  an  overpowering  anxiety ; 
and  never  was  legitimate  child  trained  and  pushed 
in  the  world  with  such  unwearied  assiduity.     He 
was  educated  under  the  best  masters  and  then 
sent,  with  a  "bear-leader,"  to  the  Continent  for 
years  to  be  ripened  and  decrotte.     Parliament  and 
diplomacy  were  both  opened  to  him,  but  in  the 
end,  owing  in  part  to  the  stigma  of  his  birth  and 
in  part  to  an  invincible  clumsiness  of  manner,  he 
proved  little  better  than  a  failure.     In  1768  his 
death  revealed  the  fact  that  he  had  been  secretly 
married  to  a  lady,  who  made  profit  of  the  connec- 
tion by  selling  the  Earl's  treasured  letters  to  her 
husband  for  /i,575-     They  were  published  in 
1774,  to  the  scandal  of  the  family  and  of  England. 
In  truth,  few  men  dared  at  the  time  to  defend 
these  extraordinary  documents.    Horace  Walpole 
was  shocked  by  their  naked  candour.     "  A  most 
proper  book  of  laws,"  he  calls  them,  "for  the 
generation  in  which  it  is  published  ' '  ;   they  have 
' '  reduced  the  folly  and  worthlessness  of  the  age 
to  a  regular  system."     But  all  the  world  read 
them,  even  though,  like  John  Wesley,  they  were 


214  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

horrified  at  the  picture  of  this  cunning  Hbertine 
"  studiously  instilUng  into  the  young  man  all  the 
principles  of  debauchery,  when  he  himself  was 
between  seventy  and  eighty  years  old."  Dr. 
Johnson,  with  more  vigour  than  justice,  had  al- 
ready, in  his  terrible  satire  of  the  patron,  held 
Chesterfield  up  to  contempt,  and  now  he  flung 
upon  the  author  of  the  I,etters  a  hideous  phrase 
which  no  amount  of  palliation  can  ever  quite 
obliterate.  These  things  occurred  toward  the  end 
of  the  century,  when  the  age  was  in  a  somewhat 
repentant  mood  for  its  sins.  Having  become 
established  in  virtue,  the  world  to-day  can  afford 
to  be  a  little  more  lenient— and  just.  For  really 
the  manners  taught  by  Lord  Chesterfield  were 
not  those  of  a  dancing  master,  nor  the  morals — 
what  Dr.  Johnson  was  permitted  to  call  them. 
There  is  enough  to  excuse  without  any  such  dis- 
tortion of  the  truth  as  this,  and,  for  the  most  part, 
Chesterfield's  morals  are  very  much  those  of  his 
age. 

Nor  would  it  be  just  to  condemn  his  frankness 
of  expression  on  the  principle  oipueris  reverentia. 
It  must  be  remembered  always  that  they  were 
written  to  an  illegitimate  son,  to  whom  the  preach- 
ing of  rigid  virtue  would  imply  either  repentance 
or  hypocrisy  on  the  part  of  the  writer,  and  Ches- 
terfield was  neither  repentant  nor  hypocritic.  It 
must  be  remembered  also  that  they  were  never 
intended  for  publication,  and  this  for  their  literary 
as  well  as  their  moral  qualities.     Their  greatest 


CHESTERFIELD  215 

fault  as  compositions  is  a  certain  monotony  arising 
from  endless  repetition  of  the  same  theme,  very 
useful  in  pressing  home  the  desired  lesson,  but 
rather  irksome  when  the  Letters  are  read  together. 
Their  chief  excellence  is  their  style,  for  which  our 
admiration  must  be  heightened  by  knowing  they 
were  entirely  unpremeditated.  To  one  who  takes 
pleasure  in  the  sheer  mastery  of  a  difl&cult  artistic 
medium,  the  language  of  Lord  Chesterfield  must 
be  a  continual  wonder  and  joy.  He  had  not  the 
measured  eloquence  of  Bolingbroke,  the  gravity 
of  Dr.  Johnson,  the  naive  grace  of  Goldsmith,  the 
homely  elegance  of  Cowper,  or  the  idiomatic  ease 
of  Gray  ;  his  style  lacks  colour  and  magnetism  ; 
but  he  had  other  qualities  which  make  his  Letters 
on  the  whole  the  finest  models  of  English  of  the 
mid-eighteenth  century,  beside  which  most  writ- 
ing in  our  tongue  seems  to  wallow  unwieldy.  It 
is  distinguished  for  precision,  unfaltering  direct- 
ness, and  a  kind  of  splendid  clearness.  It  cannot 
be  judged  from  specimens,  for  its  effect  depends 
on  sustained  balance  of  tone  ;  there  are  no  purple 
patches.  To  read  it  is  to  feel  such  an  exhilara- 
tion as  comes  from  watching  the  swift,  thin  motion 
of  a  foil  in  the  hand  of  a  skilled  fencer — and  the 
foil  has  no  button.  We  have  seen  how  he  trained 
himself  as  a  stylist  while  at  college,  but  his  real 
masters  were  the  great  French  writers,  whom  he 
knew  personally  and  imitated,  and  by  whom  he 
was  in  turn  looked  upon  as  Phonunc  le  phis  spiritucl 
des  trots  royaumes.     He  had  helped  to  introduce 


2l6  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Voltaire  and  Montesquieu  to  British  philosophy 
and  government,  and  had  filched  from  them  the 
mysteries  of  French  prose.     His  English  is  thor- 
oughly idiomatic,  but  there  is  not  the  slightest 
jar  in  passing  from  his  letters  in  that  language  to 
those  in  French  scattered  through  the  collection. 
And  from   France  also  he  borrowed  another 
trait.     Englishmen  are  not  frank,  or,  perhaps,  not 
logical.     There    is    grossness    and   plain-speak- 
ing aplenty  in  their  letters  throughout  the  eigh- 
teenth century,  but  it  is  sheer  naughtiness  ;  they 
rarely  deny  the  convention   of  morality.     Now 
Chesterfield  was  French  in  conforming  his  stand- 
ards with  his  acts.     One  finds  extremely  little  of 
the  contemporary  coarseness  in  his  Letters,  but 
they  accept  unreservedly  and,  indeed,  unblush- 
ingly  inculcate  the  practical  code  of  society  as  he 
knew  it.  They  are  overwhelmingly  honest,  honest 
in  a  far  higher  sense  than  can  be  applied,  for  in- 
stance, to  the  garrulous  self-revelation  of  a  Pepys, 
or  to  the  portrait  of  a  creature  of  impulse  like 
Tom  Jones.     Here,  if  anywhere,  the  man  of  the 
world,  the  honnete  homme,  as  he  then  was,  and 
as,  at  heart,  he  still  is,  stands  exhibited  ;  there  is 
something  almost  sublime  in  the  dry  unshrinking 
light  cast  upon  him.      And  if  much  must  be 
reprobated  in  that  character,  much  also  is  admi- 
rable and  at  all  times  worthy  of  imitation.     He 
was  the  late  product  of  an  art  which  has  practi- 
cally passed  from  the  world.     We  are  concerned 
to-day  about  our  duties  and  our  pleasures,  and 


CHESTERFIELD  21/ 

about  the  means  of  making  life  efficient ;  but  who 
is  concerned  to  mould  his  life  into  an  artistic  de- 
sign ?  We  write  enormously  of  all  the  mechani- 
cal arts,  but  where  is  to  be  found  a  modern  treatise 
on  the  one  supreme  art  of  living  ?  It  did  not  use 
to  be  so,  as  any  one  knows  who  has  read  the 
literature  of  the  Renaissance. 

It  would  carry  me  too  far,  even  if  I  had  the 
material  at  hand,  to  trace  the  development  of 
this  conception  of  life  as  one  of  the  fine  arts. 
There  are  hints  of  it  in  Xenophon  and  Horace 
and  other  writers  of  antiquity,  but  its  real  origin 
would  be  found  in  the  engrafting  of  the  classical 
sense  of  decorum  on  the  mediaeval  ideal  of  chi- 
valry. Petrarch's  sonnets  and  letters  may  be 
regarded  as  the  opening  of  the  voluminous  litera- 
ture that  sprang  up  on  the  subject,  and  the 
Decameron,  with  its  bravely  ordained  delights 
against  the  background  of  the  mortal  plague, 
started  its  course  in  fiction.'  From  these  sources 
the  art  became  gradually  defined  and  special- 
ised, reaching  its  climax  in  Castiglione's 
elaborate  dialogue  on  the  training  of  The  Courtier^ 

'  The  very  tone  and  colour  of  its  gayer  aspect  are 
given  by  Boccaccio  in  the  stately  language  of  his  Intro- 
duction :  "  lo  giudicherei  ottimamente  fatto  che  noi,  .  .  . 
fuggendo  come  la  morte  i  disonesti  esempli  degli  altri, 
onestamente  a'  nostri  luoghi  in  contado,  de'  quali  a 
ciascuna  di  noi  e  gran  copia,  ce  ne  andassimo  a  stare  :  e 
quivi  quella  festa,  quella  allegrezza,  quello  piacere  che 
noi  potessimo,  seuza  trapassare  in  alcuno  atto  il  segno 
della  ragione,  prendessimo." 


2l8  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

certainly  one  of  the  richest  fruits  of  the  Italian 
genius.  The  art  came  over  seas  to  England  with 
the  rest  of  the  Renaissance,  and  soon  made  itself 
felt  in  literature.  Lyly's  Euphues  is  at  the  head 
of  the  new  genre,  that  book,  to  follow  the  title 
page,  "Very  pleasant  for  all  Gentlemen  to  reade, 
and  most  necessary  to  remember :  wherein  are 
contained  the  delights  that  Wyt  followeth  in  his 
youth  by  the  pleasauntnesse  of  Love,  and  the 
happynesse  he  reapeth  in  age,  by  the  perfect- 
nesse  of  Wisedome."  The  Faerie  Queene  is  the 
flower  of  the  school  in  England,  with  its  con- 
fessed attempt  "to  fashion  a  gentleman  or  noble 
person  in  vertuous  and  gentle  discipline ' '  by 
uniting  "the  twelve  private  morall  vertues"  of 
Aristotle  with  the  graces  of  chivalry.  There  is 
a  long  drop  from  The  Faerie  Queene  to  Peacham's 
Compleat  Ge7iilenian  (1622),  but  the  ideal,  ut  in 
honore  cum  dignitate  vivamus,  is  still  in  view,  and 
we  are  preparing  for  Chesterfield  in  such  pas- 
sages as  this: 

There  is  no  one  thing  that  setteth  a  fairer  stampe  upon 
Nobility  than  evennesse  of  Carriage,  and  care  of  our 
Reputation,  without  which  our  most  gracefull  gifts  are 
dead  and  dull,  as  the  Diamond  without  his  foile  ;  for 
hereupon  as  on  the  frontispice  of  a  magnificent  Pallace, 
are  fixed  the  eyes  of  all  passengers,  and  hereby  the 
height  of  our  ludgements  (even  our  selves)  is  taken. 

The  Civil  War  left  scant  leisure  or  appetite  for 
discoursing  on  delicate  points  of  conduct,  and 
the   Restoration  brought  back  with  it  all  the 


CHESTERFIELD  219 

froth  of  France  without  the  substance.  It  re- 
mained for  the  dull  and  boorish  court  of  Hanover 
to  smother  vice  in  vulgarity,  and  it  was  nothing 
to  Chesterfield's  discredit  that  both  George  II. 
and  Caroline  feared  and  detested  him;  indeed, 
his  passionate  pleading  for  refinement  of  manners 
may  best  be  understood  by  reading  Hervey's 
record  of  the  family  doings  at  St.  James's  and 
Hampton  Court. 

These  Letters  of  Lord  Chesterfield  to  his  son, 
then,  are  to  be  taken  as  a  part,  and  perhaps  the 
most  valuable  part,  of  that  literature  of  Courtesy 
which  began  at  the  first  dawn  of  the  Renaissance. 
But  it  must  not  be  supposed  that  in  cultivating 
the  art  of  life  he  meant  to  belittle  the  need  of 
a  substantial  foundation.  On  the  contrary,  their 
whole  aim  was  to  prepare  the  boy  for  an  efficient 
career  as  a  statesman,  not  without  the  spur  of 
generous  service  to  his  country.  They  insist 
upon  strenuous  study,  although  my  Lord  would 
avoid  the  pedantry  of  the  universities ;  they  de- 
clare again  and  again  that  nothing  can  be  ac- 
complished without  application  and  that  habit  of 
attention  which  is  as  much  the  lesson  of  the 
world  as  of  the  closet.  The  first  letter  of  the  col- 
lection, written  in  French  to  the  lad  when  he  was 
only  seven  years  old,  is  a  disquisition  in  little 
on  the  necessity  of  cultivating  eloquence,  ending 
with  the  observation :  ''  Nascitur  Poeta.fit  Orator: 
c'est-a-dire,  qu'il  faut  etre  ne  avec  une  certaine 
force  et  vivacite  d' esprit  pour  etre  Poete  ;  mais 


2  20  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

que  r  attention,  la  lecture,  et  le  travail  suflfi- 
sent  pour  faire  un  Orateur. ' '  In  other  words,  the 
young  Stanhope  was  already  destined  for  Par- 
liament. Nor  is  morality,  as  the  writer  under- 
stood it,  neglected;  he  was  earnest  in  trying  to  set 
the  boy  ^  V  abri  des  grands  iaieils  de  la  jeunesse, 
and  was  not  ashamed  to  warn  him  from  the  evils 
of  gambling  by  his  own  example  ;  for  play,  he 
had  to  admit,  had  been  his  one  ruling  and 
wasteful  passion. 

But  it  is  true  that  toward  the  end  these  pre- 
cepts become  rather  implicit  in  the  letters  than 
openly  taught,  and  that  the  fortiter  in  re  appears 
to  be  forgotten  too  often  in  the  suaviter  in  modo; 
the  end  is  swallowed  up  in  the  means.  It  hap- 
pened that  the  young  man  developed  a  disposition 
studious  and  serious  to  excess,  with  little  care 
for  the  graces,  so  that  his  Mentor  felt  obliged  to 
lay  special  emphasis  on  all  this  side  of  education. 
The  basis  of  Chesterfield's  theory  and  something 
of  his  insight  into  the  workings  of  human  nature 
can  be  seen  from  a  few  quotations  taken  somewhat 
at  random : 

I  would  wish  you  to  be  a  Corinthian  edifice,  upon  a 
Tuscan  foundation  ;  the  latter  having  the  utmost  strength 
and  solidity  to  support,  and  the  former  all  possible  orna- 
ments to  decorate. 

A  proper  secrecy  is  the  only  mystery  of  able  men; 
mystery  is  the  only  secrecy  of  weak  and  cunning  ones. 

A  man  of  the  world  must,  like  the  chameleon,  be  able 
to  take  every  different  hue ;  which  is  by  no  means  a 


CHESTERFIELD  22  1 

criminal  or  abject,  but  a  necessary  complaisance,  for  it 
relates  only  to  manners  and  not  to  morals. 

Smooth  your  way  to  the  head  through  the  heart.  The 
way  of  reason  is  a  good  one ;  but  it  is  commonly  some- 
thing longer,  and  perhaps  not  so  sure. 

Knowledge  may  give  weight,  but  accomplishments 
only  give  lustre  ;  and  many  more  people  see  than  weigh. 

Never  seem  wiser,  nor  more  learned,  than  the  people 
you  are  with.  Wear  your  learning,  like  your  watch,  in 
a  private  pocket ;  and  do  not  pull  it  out  and  strike  it, 
merely  to  show  that  you  have  one. 

It  is  hard  to  say  which  is  the  greater  fool,  he  who  tells 
the  whole  truth  or  he  who  tells  no  truth  at  all.  Charac- 
ter is  as  necessary  in  business  aflfairs  as  in  trade.  No 
man  can  deceive  often  in  either. 

Have  a  real  reserve  with  almost  everybody,  and  have 
a  seeming  reserve  with  almost  nobody ;  for  it  is  very  dis- 
agreeable to  seem  reserved,  and  very  dangerous  not  to 
be  so. 

Good-breeding  carries  along  with  it  a  dignity  that  is 
respected  by  the  most  petulant.  Ill  breeding  invites  and 
authorises  the  familiarity  of  the  most  timid. 

When  a  man  of  sense  happens  to  be  in  that  disagree- 
able situation,  in  which  he  is  obliged  to  ask  himself 
more  than  once,  W^/iai  shall  I  do  ?  he  will  answer  him- 
self, Nothing.  When  his  reason  points  out  to  him  no 
good  way,  or  at  least  no  way  less  bad  than  another,  he 
will  stop  short  and  wait  for  light.  A  little,  busy  mind 
runs  on  at  all  events,  must  be  doing;  and,  like  a  blind 
horse,  fears  no  dangers,  because  he  sees  none. 

If  a  fool  knows  a  secret,  he  tells  it  because  he  is  a 


222  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

fool ;  if  a  knave  knows  one,  lie  tells  it  wherever  it  is  his 
interest  to  tell  it. 

Distrust  all  those  who  love  you  extremely  upon  a  very 
slight  acquaintance,  and  without  any  visible  reason.  Be 
upon  your  guard,  too,  against  those  who  confess,  as  their 
weaknesses,  all  the  cardinal  virtues. 

I  have  often  thought,  and  still  think,  that  there  are 
few  things  which  people  in  general  know  less,  than  how 
to  love  and  how  to  hate.  They  hurt  those  they  love,  by 
a  mistaken  indulgence — by  a  blindness,  nay,  often  a 
partiality  to  their  faults.  Where  they  hate,  they  hurt 
themselves,  by  ill-timed  passion  and  rage. 

Remember,  there  are  but  two  prockdes  in  the  world  for 
a  gentleman  and  a  man  of  parts  :  either  extreme  polite- 
ness or  knocking  down. 

Whoever  is  in  a  hurry  shows  that  the  thing  he  is  about 
is  too  big  for  him.  Haste  and  hurry  are  very  different 
things. 

I,  who  have  been  behind  the  scenes,  both  of  pleasure 
and  business,  and  have  seen  all  the  springs  and  pullies 
of  those  decorations  which  astonish  and  dazzle  the  audi- 
ence, retire,  not  only  without  regret,  but  with  content- 
ment and  satisfaction.  But  what  I  do,  and  ever  shall, 
regret,  is  the  time  which,  whUe  young,  I  lost  in  mere 
idleness  and  in  doing  nothing.  .  ,  .  Do  not  imagine  that 
by  the  employment  of  time  I  mean  an  uninterrupted  ap- 
plication to  serious  studies.  No ;  pleasures  are,  at  proper 
times,  both  as  necessary  and  as  useful ;  they  fashion  and 
form  you  for  the  world ;  they  teach  you  characters,  and 
show  you  the  human  heart  in  its  unguarded  minutes. 
But  then  remember  to  make  use  of  them.  I  have 
known  many  people,  from  laziness  of  mind,  go  through 
both  pleasure  and  business  with  equal  inattention ; 
neither  enjoying  the  one  nor  doing  the  other ;  think- 


CHESTERFIELD  223 

ing  themselves  men  of  pleasure  because  they  were 
mingled  with  those  who  were,  and  men  of  business  be- 
cause they  had  business  to  do,  though  they  did  not  do  it. 
Whatever  you  do,  do  it  to  the  purpose  ;  do  it  thoroughly, 
not  superficially.  Approfondissez  :  go  to  the  bottom  of 
things. 

The  sure  characteristic  of  a  sound  and  strong  mind  is 
to  find  in  everything  those  certain  bounds,  quos  ultra 
citrave  neqiiit  consistere  rectum.  These  boundaries  are 
marked  out  by  a  very  fine  line,  which  only  good  sense 
and  attention  can  discover  ;  it  is  much  too  fine  for  vulgar 
eyes.  In  manners,  this  line  is  good  breeding  ;  beyond  it, 
is  troublesome  ceremony ;  short  of  it,  is  unbecoming 
negligence  and  inattention.  In  morals,  it  divides  osten- 
tatious Puritanism  from  criminal  relaxation  ;  in  religion, 
superstition  from  impiety ;  and,  in  short,  every  virtue 
from  its  kindred  vice  or  weakness. 

Good-breeding,  and  good-nature,  do  incline  us  rather 
to  help  and  raise  people  up  to  ourselves,  than  to  mortify 
and  depress  them  ;  and,  in  truth,  our  private  interest 
concurs  in  it,  as  it  is  making  ourselves  so  many  friends, 
instead  of  so  many  enemies. 

Having  mentioned  laughing,  I  must  particularly  warn 
you  against  it ;  and  I  could  heartily  wish  that  you  may 
often  be  seen  to  smile,  but  never  heard  to  laugh  while 
you  live. 

There  is  nothing  reprehensible  in  all  this,  and 
Chesterfield's  insistence  on  the  minutest  points  of 
good-breeding — an  insistence  which  cannot  be 
conveyed  to  the  reader  by  particular  quotations — 
can  be  censured  only  when  it  is  coupled  with  the 
cynical  distrust  of  human  nature  which  he  learned 
from  Rochefoucauld  and  I^a  Bruyere  and  from 


224  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

living  society.  Undoubtedly  his  instruction  some- 
times leads  to  the  conclusion  that  men  are  either 
knaves  or  fools,  either  deceiving  or  deceived  by 
means  of  the  mere  semblance  of  things.  The  art 
of  living  has  thus,  despite  his  protests  to  the  con- 
trary, an  ugly  tendency  to  transform  itself  into  a 
masque  of  imposture.  His  second  great  maxim, 
volto  sciolto  e  pensieri  stretti,  is  at  times  not  far  re- 
moved from  Machiavelli's  system  of  moral  strat- 
egy, or,  if  we  wish  to  remain  within  Great  Britain, 
from  such  an  adaptation  of  the  system  as  this  by 
Francis  Bacon  :  "  Have  openness  in  fame  and 
repute,  secrecy  in  habit ;  dissimulation  in  season- 
able use,  and  a  power  to  feign  if  there  be  no 
remedy  ;  mixture  of  falsehood  is  like  alloy  in  coin 
of  gold  and  silver  which  may  make  the  metal 
work  better."  The  most  notorious  and  most  un- 
pardonable lapses  of  this  kind  in  Chesterfield 
occur  when  he  touches  on  the  relation  to  women. 
At  times  he  lays  himself  open  to  Wesley's  charge 
that  he  taught  pure  debauchery,  yet  his  worst  im- 
morality is  not  so  repulsive  as  the  cynicism  which 
he  adopts  fi-ankly  as  a  part  of  his  system.  What 
is  to  be  said  of  such  a  passage  as  this  ? — 

As  women  are  a  considerable,  or  at  least  a  pretty 
numerous  part,  of  company ;  and  as  their  suflfrages  go  a 
great  way  towards  establishing  a  man's  character  in  the 
fashionable  part  of  the  world  (which  is  of  great  import- 
ance to  the  fortune  and  figure  he  proposes  to  make  in  it), 
it  is  necessary  to  please  them.  I  will,  therefore,  upon 
this  subject,  let  you  into  certain  arcana,   that  will  be 


CHESTERFIELD  225 

very  useful  for  you  to  know,  but  which  you  must,  with 
the  utmost  care,  conceal,  and  never  seem  to  know. 
Women,  then,  are  only  children  of  a  larger  growth  ;  they 
have  an  entertaining  tattle,  and  sometimes  wit;  but  for 
solid,  reasoning  good-sense,  I  never  in  my  life  knew  one 
that  had  it,  or  who  reasoned  or  acted  consequentially  for 
four-and-twenty  hours  together.  .  ,  ,  A  man  of  sense 
only  trifles  with  them,  plays  with  them,  humours  and 
flatters  them.  .  .  .  They  love  mightily  to  be  dabbling 
in  business  (which,  by  the  way,  they  always  spoil) ;  and 
being  justly  distrustful,  that  men  in  general  look  upon 
them  in  a  trifling  light,  they  almost  adore  that  man,  who 
talks  more  seriously  to  them,  and  who  seems  to  consult 
and  trust  them  :  I  say,  who  seems  ;  for  weak  men  really 
do,  but  wise  men  only  seem  to  do  it. 

Here,  I  think,  my  I/)rd  falls  below  the  code  of 
honour  of  his  age,  and  fortunately  for  his  reputa- 
tion there  are  not  many  passages  in  which  he  so 
heartlessly  makes  a  prey  of  human  weaknesses. 
In  general  he  rather  inculcates  a  refined  practice 
of  gallantry,  coupling  with  it  a  sort  of  moral 
prudence  and  fastidiousness : 

The  gallantry  of  high  life,  though  not  strictly  justi- 
fiable, carries,  at  least,  no  external  marks  of  infamy 
about  it.  Neither  the  heart  nor  the  constitution  is 
corrupted  by  it ;  neither  nose  nor  character  lost  by  it ; 
manners  possibly  improved. 

I  may  be  excused  if  I  do  not  attempt  to  bring 
together  the  passages  in  which  my  Lord  initiates 
his  son  into  these  practices  of  "high  life,"  al- 
though his  instruction,  all  things  considered,  is 
not  so  shocking  to  me  as  perhaps  it  ought  to  be. 

IS 


2  26  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

Love,  or  gallantry  if  you  choose,  was  with  Ches- 
terfield only  a  chapter  in  the  larger  art  of  living — 
Disce  bonas  artes,  moneo,  Romana  inventus — and 
if  it  may  seem  to  verge  more  on  Ovid's  Ars 
Amayidi  than  on  Petrarch's  bastard  Platonism 
(which  Plato  would  have  been  the  first  to  repudi- 
ate), it  still  contains  the  virtue  of  discipline  and 
the  graces  of  delicate  choice.  It  may  be  something 
less  than  "strictly  justifiable" — so  far  my  Lord 
would  go  in  apology — but  we  are  forced  to  admit 
that  the  ages  when  life  has  seemed  most  noble 
and  beautiful  have  commonly  accepted  this  ars 
amandi  as  a  necessary  part  of  their  code,  and  that 
a  denial  of  the  code  has  too  often  meant  (as  some 
would  think  it  means  to-day)  a  retention  of  their 
vice  with  a  loss  of  their  grace. 

At  least  the  lessons  of  Chesterfield  were  the 
practice  of  society  in  his  day,  if  not  in  all  days, 
and  in  the  end  our  indignation  reduces  itself  to 
Walpole's  disgust  at  seeing  the  frailty  of  man- 
kind clothed  in  high  authority.  There  is  an  inev- 
itable injustice  in  writing  about  Chesterfield,  for 
the  more  questionable  side  of  his  morality  some- 
how assumes  an  importance  out  of  all  proportion 
to  its  real  place.  Only  long  familiarity  with  his 
Letters  can  acquaint  one  with  their  better  wisdom 
and  their  brave  and  unfailing  acceptance  of  human 
conditions.  It  is  depressingly  easy  to  lay  bare 
the  snares  to  virtue  they  contain,  whereas  only 
here  and  there  will  any  reader  clearly  apprehend 
and  make  his  own  that  supreme  art  of  living  of 


CPIESTERFIELD  22/ 

which  they  are  the  last  and  most  honest  exhi- 
bition. We  shall  do  well  to  take  leave  of  him  in 
a  few  words  from  the  World,  in  which  he  shows 
the  better  and  more  genuine  side  of  his  system  : 

To  sacrifice  one's  own  self-love  to  other  people's,  is  a 
short,  but  I  believe,  a  true  definition  of  civility:  to  do 
it  with  ease,  propriety,  and  grace  is  good-breeding.  The 
one  is  the  result  of  good  nature;  the  other  of  good  sense, 
joined  to  experience,  observation,  and  attention. 

His  letters  may  be  said  to  present  the  Sir  Charles 
Grandison  of  life  as  it  is  really  lived. 


SIR  HENRY  WOTTON 

Fbw  men  have  been  happier  in  their  fortune 
with  posterity  than  Sir  Henry  Wotton.  Not  only 
was  he  included  by  Izaak  Walton  in  that  band 
of  five  whose  precious  Lives  may  be  called  the 
hagiology  of  English  literature,  but  he  figures 
also  in  The  Compieat  Angler  q.s  a  fisherman  whose 
* '  learning,  wit,  and  cheerfulness  made  his  com- 
pany to  be  esteemed  one  of  the  delights  of 
mankind."  And  now,  in  these  latest  days,  his 
Life  has  been  again  written  and  his  Letters 
edited  with  rare  erudition  and  still  rarer  taste.' 
To  most  readers  the  first  feeling  on  taking  up 
Mr.  Pearsall  Smith's  two  volumes  will  be  an 
uneasiness  lest  the  self-revelation  of  the  courtier 
in  his  letters  may  shatter  the  image  formed 
by  Walton's  eulogy,  but  such  a  fear  is  soon  dis- 
pelled. Here  is  the  Wotton  we  have  always 
known,  with  perhaps  some  change  of  emphasis 
from  the  peaceful  consummation  to  the  busy  di- 
versity of  his  life,  but  still  the  same  stately  gentle- 
man, walking  with  sweet  composure  through  the 
spacious  world  of  Elizabeth  and  James.  And  to 
his  slender  poetical  reputation  as  the  author  of 

'  The  Life  attd  Letters  of  Sir  Henry  Wotton.  By 
Logan  Pearsall  Smith.  Oxford:  At  the  Clarendon  Press. 
1907. 

228 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  229 

two  or  three  treasured  lyrics  must  now  be  added 
the  honour  of  standing  first,  and  not  least,  in 
the  long  line  of  great  English  letter-writers. 
Something  of  his  epistolary  grace  was  already 
guessed  from  Walton's  Rcliquice  IVoitojiiana  and 
from  other  scattered  sources,  but  it  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  five  hundred  letters  brought 
together  by  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith  from  his  enormous 
correspondence,  many  of  them  here  printed  for 
the  first  time,  stir  us  with  the  delightful  shock 
of  discovery. 

Too  much,  of  course,  must  not  be  expected 
from  a  letter-writer  of  that  day.  He  afibrds  little 
of  the  nimble,  light-heeled  entertainment  of  James 
Howell,  who  as  a  young  traveller  received  favours 
of  "my  Lord  Ambassador  Wotton"  at  Venice, 
and  as  a  writer  has  been  raised  to  a  somewhat 
factitious  eminence  by  Thackeray.  He  lacks,  it 
need  scarcely  be  added,  the  elusive  cross-lights  of 
thought  and  emotion,  the  intimate  self-searchings, 
and  the  homely  confidences  that  entice  us  to  more 
modern  correspondents.  He  is  often — and  this  is 
hardest  to  condone — exasperatingly  blind  to  the 
interests  of  the  future.  Thus  on  2  July,  1613, 
Wotton  wTote  to  Sir  Edmund  Bacon  (nephew  of 
Lord  Verulam  and  husband  of  Wotton' s  niece), 
telling  of  the  fire  which  three  days  before  had 
consumed  the  Globe  Theatre  while  Henry  VIII., 
or  an  adaptation  of  it,  was  acting.  It  is  a  hasty 
brief  note,  to  be  sure,  yet  the  writer  has  time 
to  crack  his  jokes  on  the  "only  one  man"  who 


230  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

"had  his  breeches  set  on  fire,  that  would  perhaps 
have  broiled  him,  if  he  had  not  by  the  benefit  of  a 
provident  wit  put  it  out  with  bottle  ale, ' '  and  to 
fling  his  gibe  at  plays  ' '  sufficient  in  truth  within 
a  while  to  make  greatness  very  familiar,  if  not 
ridiculous" — he  has  time  for  this,  yet  never 
names  the  writer  of  that  play  whom,  sitting  at 
ease  perhaps  with  Essex  and  Southampton,  he 
must  often  have  seen  on  the  stage,  ' '  a  motley  to 
the  view,"  and  of  whom  he  might  have  heard 
so  much,  and  such  strange  things,  fi-om  the 
younger  man  when  in  1599  he  and  Southamp- 
ton accompanied  Essex  on  the  ill-fated  Irish 
expedition.  How  much  we  would  spare  in  these 
letters  for  a  glimpse  of  Shakespeare  playing  his 
part  in  the  Globe  Theatre  or  making  court  to 
his  supercilious  patrons !  It  may  be  unfair  to 
ask  of  Wotton  what  no  one  else  of  his  age  con- 
descended to  give  us,  but  it  is  just  the  prerogative 
of  genius  to  forestall  the  concern  of  future  times. 
However,  if  Wotton  missed  the  prophetic  in- 
stinct of  genius  and  the  spontaneous  dexterity  of 
wit,  he  had  brave  qualities  to  compensate.  His 
language  may  occasionally  move  a  little  slowly 
for  our  taste,  but  it  is  always  courtly  and  re- 
fined, while  now  and  then  there  breaks  through 
his  reserve  that  note  of  piercing  beauty  which 
only  the  Elizabethans  could  utter  at  random.  In 
June  of  16 1 5  Wotton,  then  at  The  Hague  and 
exasperated  with  long  and  futile  diplomatic  busi- 
ness, is  again  writing  to  his  dearest  friend  Sir 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  23 1 

Edmund  Bacon;  and  his  letter  is  so  short  and 
so  comprehensive  withal  that  it  may  be  copied 
in  full : 

Sir, 

I  hear  a  little  voice  that  you  are  come  to  London, 
which  to  me  is  the  voice  of  a  nightingale  ;  for  since  I 
cannot  enjoy  your  presence,  I  make  myself  happy  with 
your  nearness  ;  and  yet  now,  methinks,  I  have  a  kind  of 
rebellion  against  it,  that  we  should  be  separated  with 
such  a  contemptible  distance.  For  how  much  I  love 
you,  mine  own  heart  doth  know;  and  God  knoweth  my 
heart.  But  let  me  fall  into  a  passion :  for  what  sin,  in 
the  name  of  Christ,  was  I  sent  hither  among  soldiers, 
being  by  my  profession  academical,  and  by  my  charge 
pacifical  ?  I  am  within  a  day  or  two  to  send  Cuthberd 
my  servant  home,  by  whom  I  shall  tell  you  divers 
things.  In  the  meanwhile,  I  have  adventured  these  few 
lines,  to  break  the  ice  of  silence ;  for  in  truth,  it  is  a  cold 
fault.     Our  sweet  Saviour  bless  you. 

Servidore, 

Arrigo  Wottoni. 

My  hot  love  to  the  best  niece  of  the  world. 

The  note  may  be  pitched  a  degree  above  his 
wont,  yet  it  is  not  beyond  the  compass  of  that 
"passionate  plainness"  which  he  himself  made 
the  mark  of  his  writing.  And  here  in  little  space 
the  character  of  the  whole  man  stands  outlined 
before  the  eye  :  here  are  intimated  the  warmth  of 
his  family  ties  and  friendships,  his  love  of  things 
Italian  which  made  him  the  highest  type  of  the 
"  Italianate  Englishman,"  his  scholarly  taste,  his 
union  of  the  diplomat  and  the  uncompromised 


232  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

spectator,  his  religious  earnestness,  and  his  crav- 
ing for  quiet.  Were  it  not  fantastic,  we  might 
liken  this  miniature  shadow  of  his  life  to  Kepler' s 
newly-invented  camera  obscura  which  he  saw  at 
Vienna  and  described  in  a  letter  to  the  great 
Bacon.  To  fill  out  the  details  of  that  picture 
is  impossible,  and  unnecessary,  within  the  scope 
of  an  essay ;  even  to  name  all  his  distinguished 
friends  would  carry  us  too  far.  In  England  there 
was  the  large  circle  of  his  family,  Wottons  and 
Bacons,  Mortons,  Throckmortons,  and  Finches, 
many  of  whom  are  remembered  in  history  as  well 
as  in  his  letters.  With  James  I.  he  corresponded 
directly,  prince  and  subject  being  evidently  drawn 
together  by  certain  tastes  in  common ;  to  Robert 
Cecil,  first  Earl  of  Salisbury,  he  wrote  both  as  a 
diplomatic  agent  and  as  a  friend ;  he  served  the 
overweening  Essex,  in  whose  downfall  he  was 
almost  involved.  These  are  a  few  of  the  great 
names  connected  with  his  at  home ;  and  abroad 
his  travels,  undertaken  first  to  complete  his  edu- 
cation, were  but  a  continuation  of  the  noble  art 
of  friendship. 

As  for  education,  that  may  be  called  the  busi- 
ness of  his  whole  life.  It  began  with  the  happy 
influences  attending  his  birth,  in  1568,  at  the 
family  home  in  Kent,  "  an  ancient  and  goodly 
structure,  beautifying  and  being  beautified  by 
the  parish  church  of  Bocton  Malherbe  adjoin- 
ing unto  it,  and  both  seated  within  a  fair  park  of 
the  Wottons,  on  the  brow  of  such  a  hill  as  gives 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  233 

the  advantage  of  a  large  prospect,  and  of  equal 
pleasure  to  all  beholders";  and  with  the  tradi- 
tions of  a  family  who  accepted  or  refused  the 
baits  of  the  great  world  with  a  proud  independ- 
ence.    His  grandfather  rejected  the  ofi&ce  of  L,ord 
Chancellor  from  the  hands  of  Henry  VIII.,  and 
his    great  uncle,    a   man  who    loved  quietness 
though  very  wise,  as  William   Cecil  described 
him,  might  have  been  Archbishop  of  Canterbury 
under  Elizabeth,  had  he  so  chosen.     His  father, 
according  to  Walton,  was  also  "  a  man  of  great 
modesty,  of  a  most  plain  and  single  heart,  and  of 
ancient  freedom  and  integrity  of  mind."     From 
such  a  home  and  family  the  boy  Henry  went  to 
the  school  at  Winchester.     Of  his  doings  there 
nothing  is  known  save  what  Izaak  Walton  re- 
ports from  the  old  man's  recollections.     "  How 
useful,"  said  Wotton  to  a  travelling-companion 
the  summer  before  his  death,  "  was  that  advice  of 
a  holy  monk,  who  persuaded  his  friend  to  per- 
form his  customary  devotions  in  a  constant  place, 
because  in  that  place  we  usually  meet  with  those 
very  thoughts  which  possessed  us  at  our  last  be- 
ing there.     And  I  find  it  thus  far  experimentally 
true,  that,  at  my  being  in  that  school,  and  seeing 
that  very  place  where  I  sate  when  I  was  a  boy, 
occasioned  me  to  remember  those  very  thoughts 
of  my  youth  which  then  possessed  me:    sweet 
thoughts  indeed,  that  promised  my  growing  years 
numerous  pleasures,  without  mixtures  of  cares. 
.  .  .  But  age  and  experience  have  taught  me  that 


234  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

those  were  but  empty  hopes ;  for  I  have  always 
found  it  true,  as  my  Saviour  did  foretell,  Suffi- 
cient for  the  day  is  the  evil  thereof  Nevertheless, 
I  saw  there  a  succession  of  boys  using  the  same 
recreations,  and,  questionless,  possessed  with  the 
same  thoughts  that  then  possessed  me.  Thus 
one  generation  succeeds  another,  both  in  their 
lives,  recreations,  hopes,  fears,  and  death." — Was 
the  "holy  monk"  Wotton's  Venetian  friend 
Paolo  Sarpi?  and  did  Gray  have  this  passage 
in  mind  when  he  wrote  his  Eton  ode  ? 

At  the  age  of  sixteen  (1584)  Wotton  proceeded 
to  Oxford,  where  he  stayed  four  years,  adding  to 
his  circle  of  acquaintance  the  poet  John  Donne 
and  the  Italian  professor  of  civil  law  Alberico 
Gentili.  After  the  university  came  the  grand 
tour.  Here  his  letters  begin  with  his  going 
abroad,  in  1589,  and  until  his  return,  in  1594,  are 
filled  with  flitting  glimpses  of  student  life  at 
Heidelberg,  Vienna,  Geneva,  and  other  cities  of  the 
North,  and  with  the  adventures  of  a  Protestant 
Englishman  travelling  disguised  as  a  German 
through  the  states  of  Italy — "  a  paradise  inhabited 
with  devils,"  he  calls  the  land.  Now  it  is  the 
difficulty  of  getting  copies  of  forbidden  books  he 
relates,  again  he  describes  some  famous  library  ; 
but  always  he  is  in  search  of  friends  among  the 
notable  scholars  where  he  visits  :  ' '  My  most  good 
and  kind  mother,"  he  wrote  from  Altdorf,  "  let 
no  cares  taken  for  your  sons  be  cause  of  less  com- 
fortable thoughts  unto  you.  ...  It  is  knowledge 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  235 

I  seek,  and  to  live  in  the  seeking  of  that  is  my 
only  pleasure. ' '  The  best-known  of  his  scholastic 
friendships  was  with  Casaubon,  with  whom  he 
lodged  for  fourteen  months  at  Geneva.  "Ah, 
what  days  those  were,"  exclaimed  the  older  man 
years  afterwards,  ' '  when  heedless  of  the  lateness 
of  the  hour  we  passed  whole  nights  in  lettered 
talk!  I  hanging  on  your  stories  of  all  you  had 
seen  of  many  men  and  many  lands  [this  was  at 
the  end  of  Wotton's  wanderings]  ;  you  pleased  to 
hear  somewhat  of  my  desultory  readings.  Oh! 
that  was  life  worth  living  !  pure  happiness  !  I 
cannot  recall  those  times  without  groaning  in 
spirit."  —  Coryat  and  Fines  Moryson  reported 
the  meeting  of  famous  scholars  in  their  Conti- 
nental tours,  but  their  acquaintance  was  not  of 
this  stamp.  Nor,  at  a  later  date,  have  the  mem- 
oranda of  John  Evelyn's  inveterate  curiosity  for 
celebrities  the  grace  of  these  familiar  letters. 

When  in  after  years  Wotton  travelled  as  the 
accredited  representative  of  the  King,  he  naturally 
made  friendships  of  another  sort.  Yet  his  draw- 
ing to  Sarpi  at  Venice  was  as  much  for  the  friar's 
vast  erudition  as  for  his  influence  in  the  rebellion 
of  the  city  against  the  Pope.  He  nowhere  draws 
a  more  finished  character  than  that  in  his  letters 
after  the  Frate's  death ;  scarcely  anywhere  does 
he  stop  to  note  so  minutely  the  dear  eccentricities 
of  a  friend  as  when  he  observes  the  habit  of  the 
scholar,  while  reading  or  writing  alone,  "to  sit 
fenced  with  a  castle  of  paper  about  his  chair  and 


236  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

over  his  head,  for  he  was  of  our  Lord  of  St. 
Alban's  opinion  that  all  air  is  predatory  and 
especially  hurtful  when  the  spirits  are  most 
employed." 

For  friendship  or  love  of  the  other  sex  there  is, 
with  a  single  exception,  no  concern  in  these  let- 
ters. To  the  women  of  his  own  family,  his 
mother  and  sisters  and  nieces,  he  showed  indeed 
a  noble  affection,  and  in  his  later  years  he  found 
unfailing  comfort  in  the  society  of  those  of  them 
that  remained.  It  was  a  niece,  Philippa,  wife  of 
Sir  Edmund  Bacon,  to  whom  was  sent  his  "  hot 
love  ' '  in  the  letter  already  quoted,  and  of  her 
on  her  death  he  wrote  to  his  bereaved  friend  in 
language  almost  sobbing  with  pain  : 

Among  those  that  have  deep  interest  in  whatsoever  can 
befall  you,  I  am  the  freshest  witness  of  your  unexpressible 
affections  to  my  most  dear  niece  ;  whom  God  hath  taken 
from  us  into  His  eternal  light  and  rest,  where  we  must 
leave  her,  till  we  come  unto  her.  I  should  think  myself 
unworthy  for  ever  of  that  love  she  bore  me,  if  in  this  case 
I  were  fit  to  comfort  you. 

These  were  the  bonds  of  kinship,  always  sacred 
to  Sir  Henry  ;  but  for  women  as  possible  dis- 
turbers of  his  heart  he  had  in  general,  I  fear,  a 
low  conceit.  Only  once,  apparently,  does  he  hint 
at  marriage  for  himself,  and  that  is  when,  after 
complaining  of  his  incompetent  fortune,  he  adds 
coolly  :  "  Perad venture  I  may  light  upon  a  widow 
that  will  take  pity  of  me. ' '  His  observations  on 
woman  in  the  Table  Talk,  now  first  printed  by 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  237 

Mr.  Pearsall  Smith,  are  even  less  romantic,  where 
they  are  not  too  plain-spoken  to  be  repeated. 
"  Next  to  no  wife  and  children,"  he  says,  "  your 
own  wife  and  children  are  best  pastime  ;  another's 
wife  and  your  children  worse  ;  j'our  wife  and 
another's  children  worst."  And  again:  "Wit 
and  a  woman  are  two  frail  things,  and  both  the 
frailer  by  concurring. ' '  These  are  the  sentiments 
of  his  mature  years,  taken  down  while  at  Venice; 
they  correspond  well  enough  with  the  poem 
written  "  in  his  youth  " : 

O  faithless  world,  and  thy  most  faithless  part, 

A  woman's  heart! 
The  true  shop  of  variety,  where  sits 

Nothing  but  fits 
And  fevers  of  desire,  and  pangs  of  love, 

Which  toys  remove.    .   .  . 
Untrue  she  was  ;  yet  I  believed  her  eyes, 

Instructed  spies, 
Till  I  was  taught,  that  love  was  but  a  school 

To  breed  a  fool.  .  ,  , 
Excuse  no  more  thy  folly  ;  but,  for  cure, 

Blush  and  endure 
As  well  thy  shame  as  passions  that  were  vain; 

And  think,  't  is  gain. 
To  know  that  love  lodged  iu  a  woman's  breast, 

Is  but  a  guest. 

This  is  not  the  cynicism  of  the  voluptuary, 
for,  despite  the  scandalous  anecdote  told  by  Ben 
Jonson  to  Drummoud — with  what  hearty  glee 
one  can  imagine — it  should  appear  that  Wotton, 
like  another  Milton  and  with  less  necessity  of 


238  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

protesting  his  innocence  than  the  prying  Coryat, 
carried  with  him  on  his  travels  the  Puritanic 
notion  of  chastity.  On  his  first  setting  out  he 
writes  to  his  brother  that,  if  any  of  his  friends 
had  conceived  a  loose  humour  in  him,  they  should 
correct  it  for  an  error,  and  be  assured  he  can  teach 
his  soul  ' '  to  run  against  the  delights  of  fond 
youth."  And  to  his  mother  about  the  same  time 
he  sends  his  rule  of  conduct :  ' '  The  point  I  study 
daily  is  to  converse  with  all  sorts,  and  yet  in  mine 
own  manner  and  conscience."  Nor  does  his  dis- 
trust ring  like  a  mere  echo  of  the  age's  affecta- 
tion, caught  up  from  the  classical  mutabile  semper 
and  a  long  succession  of  mediaeval  writers ;  the 
note  is  too  personal  for  that  and  might  rather 
suggest  some  early  disappointment  as  its  first 
source.  It  is,  I  think,  the  cynicism  born  of  min- 
gled ignorance  and  idealism — if  these  two  words, 
in  such  human  relations,  do  not  connote  the  same 
thing.  That  Wotton  remained  all  his  life  at  bot- 
tom ignorant  of  the  individual  woman's  character 
may  be  inferred  from  his  blundering  attempt  to 
frighten  I^ady  Arundel  from  Venice  by  reporting 
rumours  of  her  intended  arrest.  Wofully  he 
misread  that  imperious  lady's  temper,  and  of  all 
his  diplomatic  mishaps  none  proved  more  humili- 
ating than  this.  And  with  this  ignorance  went  a 
distrust  of  any  passions  that  might  break  down 
the  philosophic  independence  which  he  sought  as 
the  ideal  of  life,  and  might  subject  him  to  serve 
anothef  s  will.     Women  to  such  men  the  world 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  239 

over  have  been  more  the  projection  of  their  own 
emotions  than  individual  entities,  and  have  been 
dreaded  as  a  sj^mbol  of  our  subjugation  to  the 
fickle  body.  Only  remoteness  of  position  can 
bring  liberty  from  this  uneasiness,  by  raising  the 
woman  herself  into  an  image  of  detachment  from 
the  earth.  And  one  such  vision  passed  through 
the  life  of  our  philosophic  diplomat. 

In  1613,  Ehzabeth,  the  daughter  of  James  I., 
had  been  married  at  London  to  the  Elector 
Palatine  and  had  gone  to  reside  at  Heidelberg. 
Her  secretary  and  English  agent  was  Albertus 
Morton,  one  of  Sir  Henry's  nephews.  Wotton 
may  well  have  met  the  princess  at  her  father's 
court,  and  felt  the  charm  of  her  winsome  beauty, 
perhaps  observed  the  prophetic  mark  that  super- 
stition or  an  instinct  of  destiny  loves  to  set 
on  graces  doomed  to  adversity.  At  any  rate, 
when  travelling  to  Venice  on  his  second  embassy, 
he  stopped  at  Heidelberg  long  enough  to  become 
the  trusted  friend  of  the  Electress  and  to  hear  the 
difl&culties  of  her  life.  And  again,  on  his  way 
thither  for  his  third  embassy  he  was  commis- 
sioned to  stop  at  Vienna  and  take  a  hand  in 
straightening  out  the  Bohemian  tangle.  Of  that 
wretched  embroglio  this  is  no  place  to  speak  at 
length.  In  1619  the  Elector  Palatine  had  been 
elected  to  the  throne  of  Bohemia,  which  had  been 
made  vacant  by  the  summary  process  of  "  defen- 
estration." The  new  emperor  Ferdinand,  how- 
ever, immediately  laid  claim  to  that  crown,  and 


240  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

took  it,  not  only  depriving  the  Palsgrave  and  his 
wife  of  their  royal  honours  but  ejecting  them 
from  the  Palatinate  as  well.  Wotton  was  scarcely 
the  man  to  stay  the  Emperor's  hand,  especially 
when  he  received  a  wavering  support  from  home; 
but  before  setting  out  on  his  vain  errand,  "  being 
in  Green  witch  Parke,"  as  a  letter  of  the  day  ex- 
plicitly notes,  he  composed  the  lovely  * '  sonnet ' ' 
to  the  Queen,  which  has  made  his  fame  as  a  poet, 
if  not  as  a  man  of  business : 

You  meaner  beauties  of  the  Night, 

That  poorly  satisfy  our  eyes, 
More  by  your  numbers  than  your  light. 

You  common  people  of  the  skies  ; 

What  are  you  when  the  Moon  shall  rise  ? 

You  curious  chanters  of  the  Wood, 
That  warble  forth  dame  Nature's  lays, 

Thinking  your  passions  understood 

By  your  weak  accents  ;  what 's  your  praise 
When  Philomel  her  voice  shall  raise  ? 

You  violets  that  first  appear, 

By  your  pure  purple  mantle  known, 

Like  the  proud  virgins  of  the  year, 
As  if  the  Spring  were  all  your  own  ; 
What  are  you  when  the  Rose  is  blown  ? 

So  when  my  Mistress  shall  be  seen 
In  form  and  beauty  of  her  mind. 

By  Virtue  first,  then  choice  a  Queen, 
Tell  me  if  she  were  not  design'd 
Th'  eclipse  and  glory  of  her  kind  ? 

Queen  and  not  Queen  she  was,  chosen  and  re- 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  24 1 

jected.  Of  her  subsequent  adventures  and  of  her 
mock  court  at  The  Hague,  where  she  drew  about 
her  such  friends  as  Descartes,  there  is  much  to 
read  in  the  annals  of  the  day.  Wotton  was  not 
the  only  gentleman  who  worshipped  loyally  this 
unfortunate  lady  called,  as  Howell  notes,  "  the 
Queen  of  Bohemia  and  for  her  winning,  princely 
comportment  the  Queen  of  Hearts ' ' ;  there  were 
these  foolish  Jacobites  long  before  that  word  be- 
came current  politically,  and  it  is  one  of  the  con- 
temptuous ironies  of  fate  that  she  should  have 
been  the  grandmother  of  George  I.  But  of  her 
admirers  Wotton  alone  was  able  to  express  the 
poetry  of  devotion  in  his  letters.  In  1628,  on 
the  death  of  one  who  had  served  faithfully  both 
the  Queen  and  himself,  he  sends  the  famous  epi- 
gram, really  his  own,  to  a  correspondent  at  The 
Hague : 

If  the  Queen  have  not  heard  the  epitaph  of  Albertus 
Morton  and  his  lady,  it  is  worth  her  hearing  for  the 
passionate  plainness : 

He  first  deceased.     She  for  a  little  tried 
To  live  without  him :  liked  it  not  and  died. 

Authoris  Incerti. 

And  on  the  same  day  he  directed  to  that  ' '  most 
resplendent  Queen,  even  in  the  darkness  of  for- 
tune," a  letter  which,  as  it  is  preserved  to  us, 
begins  abruptly : 

Yet  my  mind  and  my  spirits  give  me,  against  all  the 
combustions  of  the  world,  that  before  I  die  I  shall  kiss 
16 


242  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

again  your  royal  hand,  in  as  merry  an  hour  as  when 
I  last  had  the  honour  to  wait  upon  your  gracious  eyes  at 
Heidelberg. 

Wotton  did  not  die  for  eleven  years  after  that, 
while  Elizabeth  lived  on  through  all  the  com- 
bustions of  the  Civil  War,  but  he  never  again 
saw  those  gracious  eyes  or  kissed  that  "most 
sweet  and  gracious  hand. ' ' 

I  have  dwelt  at  length  on  this  episode  in  his 
life  because  in  some  respects  it  shows  more  of 
the  real  man  than  the  diplomatic  events  which 
occupy  the  larger  part  of  his  correspondence. 
Besides  his  lesser  missions,  such  as  his  visits  to 
Tiu-in  to  forward  the  much-desired  Savoy  match, 
his  embassy  to  The  Hague  during  the  tangled 
Juliers-Cleves  controversy,  and  his  fool's  errand 
to  Heidelberg  and  Vienna  in  the  Bohemian  quar- 
rel, which  brought  him  only  disappointment  and 
chagrin  save  for  that  flower  of  the  Queen's  friend- 
ship,— besides  these  missions  which,  as  much  by 
the  fault  of  the  King  as  of  himself,  were  all  fruit- 
less, he  was  three  times  resident  ambassador  to 
the  Republic  of  Venice  (1604-1610,  1616-1619, 
1621-1623),  and  there  is  really  more  of  Italian 
than  of  English  history  in  his  life.  I  cannot 
quite  agree  with  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith  in  holding 
the  letters  from  the  Adriatic  so  much  the  most 
interesting  of  the  collection,  for  Wotton,  to  my 
thinking,  is  never  more  amusing  than  when 
stirred  to  petulance  by  such  barren  intrigues  as 
those  at  Vienna.     Yet  this  is  not  to  deny  the 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  243 

great  value  of  the  Italian  letters  historically  or  to 
underrate  their  pictorial  and  human  qualities. 
Other  English  travellers  of  the  time  have  left 
their  record  of  "  that  most  glorious,  renowned, 
and  virgin  city  of  Venice,"  "  a  place  where  there 
is  nothing  wanting  that  heart  can  wish,"  and 
have  lauded  her  "  incomparable  and  most  de- 
cantated  majesty";  but  none  knew  the  inmost 
wheels  of  her  machinery  as  Wotton  knew  them, 
and  none  wrote  so  fully  of  her  splendours  and  her 
embarrassments.  With  the  help  of  Mr.  Pearsall 
Smith's  notes  one  may  almost  feel  oneself  pres- 
ent at  those  audiences  of  the  Collegio,  where  the 
perplexed  and  scolding  politics  of  Europe  were 
reduced  to  the  stately  harangue  and  reply  of 
Venetian  eloquence.  And  in  this  city  Wotton 
found  opportunity  for  the  single  international 
question  that  engaged  his  whole  heart.  Political 
differences  had  brought  Venice  into  open  conflict 
with  the  Pope ;  for  a  while  she  defied  the  Roman 
excommunication  and  was  on  the  verge  of  throw- 
ing herself  into  the  arms  of  the  Reformation. 
Sarpi,  the  greatest  Italian  of  the  age,  indefatiga- 
ble scholar  and  inflexible  moralist,  governed  from 
his  cell  the  religious  policy  of  the  city,  and  Wot- 
ton, the  only  living  person  to  whom  it  is  known 
that  he  confided  his  authorship  of  "  The  Council 
of  Trent,"  lived  in  daily  hope  of  his  complete 
conversion  to  Protestantism.  Here  was  room  for 
all  the  ardour  and  diligence  of  Wotton's  religious 
nature.     Shiploads  of  King  James's  controversial 


2  44  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

books,  in  whose  efficacy  Wotton  avowed  a  naive 
or  courtly  trust,  were  imported  for  distribution 
in  Venice ;  plans  were  laid  and  measures,  futile  in 
the  end,  were  actually  taken  to  establish  a  Pro- 
testant college  on  the  borders  of  Italy,  which 
should  offset  the  Jesuit  Propaganda  and  with- 
draw the  Pope  "from  troubling  of  other  kingdoms 
to  help  himself  in  the  bowels  of  Italy ' ' ;  and 
various  other  movements  were  set  afoot,  all  of 
which  are  narrated — and  their  importance  in 
some  cases  scarcely  exaggerated — in  the  ambas- 
sador's bulletins  to  the  King  and  to  the  Secretaries 
of  State. 

And  if  Wotton  failed  in  this  high  design,  it 
was  owing  to  the  irresistible  current  of  history, 
and  not  to  that  half-heartedness  which,  as  one 
suspects,  he  carried  into  most  of  his  other  diplo- 
matic undertakings.  For  it  becomes  clear  that 
he  was  a  man  out  of  place  in  the  world  of  in- 
trigue, and  this,  rather  than  any  tendency  to 
double-dealing  on  his  part,  was  probably  the 
cause  of  the  suspicions  he  aroused  in  some  of 
those  who  were  playing  the  game  in  earnest ; 
they  could  not  understand  his  motives.  This  is 
not  to  say  that  Wotton  was  altogether  above, 
or  even  unskilled  in,  the  underground  arts  that 
formed  the  chief  occupation  of  these  international 
agents.  He  appears  to  have  been  particularly 
dexterous  in  the  detective  service — then  officially 
recognised — of  spying  on  individuals  and  inter- 
cepting letters,  and  his  palace  was  a  meeting-place 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  245 

for  bravi  and  informers  of  all  sorts.  If  any  excuse 
for  such  practices  were  needed  beyond  the  uni- 
versal custom  of  the  day,  Wotton  would  have 
found  it  in  the  need  of  meeting  his  enemies  with 
their  own  weapons : 

I  do  first  give  your  Lordship  very  humble  thanks  [he 
writes  to  Salisbury]  for  the  expediting  of  my  extraordi- 
nary allowances  at  ^200  a  quarter  ;  though  with  just  pro- 
testation that  I  shall  be  a  loser  by  it,  for  I  have  laid  at 
the  chargeablest,  so  the  best,  means  and  ways  of  the 
world  to  furnish  his  Majesty  with  the  knowledge  of  the 
secretest  practices  out  of  the  very  packets  of  the  Jesuits 
themselves,  and  herein  the  seat  of  this  town  (fit  for  inter- 
ception) doth  somewhat  advantage  me  ;  and  mine  own 
zeal,  not  to  be  altogether  unfruitful,  hath  made  me  like- 
wise bestow  some  instruments  in  other  places  that  are 
places  of  passage.  So  as  for  that  money  which  I  spend 
of  his  Majesty's  abroad,  I  presume,  according  to  the 
measure  of  my  understanding,  that  I  shall  tender  him 
at  least  an  accompt  of  my  honest  industry:  I  call  that 
honest  which  tendeth  to  the  discovery  of  such  as  are  not 
so,  by  what  means  soever,  while  I  am  upon  the  present 
occupation. 

Few  diplomatic  agents  of  the  age  would  have 
felt  any  need  of  adding  such  an  apology  —  est 
q2iidam  7isus  Ttiendaciorum.  And  if  it  is  unpleas- 
ant to  learn  that  Wotton's  conscience  was  elas- 
tic enough  to  listen  to  the  suggestions  of  an 
anonymous  cutthroat  who  offered  to  send  Tyrone 
a  casa  del  Diavolo,  we  must  remember  that  he 
is  not  ashamed  to  relate  the  affair  to  the  King 
of  England  and  that   the  life  of  such  an  exile 


246  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

as  this  Irisli  leader  was  nowhere  held  sacred. 
On  the  whole  Wotton  was  remarkable  for  his 
honesty  both  in  word  and  deed.  Once  or  twice 
he  may  have  received  pensions  from  others  than 
the  master  he  represented,  but  never  to  that 
master's  detriment,  and  more  than  once  he  re- 
fused with  indignation  money  that  most  of  his 
contemporaries  would  have  pocketed.  "  I  must 
tell  you  I  am  a  poor  gentleman,"  he  said  to  one 
who  held  out  a  bribe,  "  but  bred  among  the  noble 
arts,  not  venal,  no  traitor,  and  I  would  advise  you 
to  leave  my  house  and  never  to  return  nor  to 
venture  to  speak  to  any  of  my  people."  He  only 
regretted  that  he  had  not  instantly  drawn  upon 
the  tempter.  A  poor  man  for  his  position  he 
remained  all  his  life,  and  his  latter  days  were 
troubled  by  eflforts  to  wring  from  Government 
back  payments  due  him,  and  to  satisfy  his  own 
creditors  who  on  one  occasion  went  so  far  as  to 
imprison  him  for  debt.  Nor  was  he,  in  smaller 
affairs  at  least,  inefl&cient.  From  Venice  he  ob- 
tained many  valuable  concessions  touching  men 
and  commercial  regulations ;  while  at  home  he 
was  able  to  keep  the  volatile  mind  of  James 
amused  with  the  current  wit  of  Italy,  and  to 
maintain  himself  in  favour  by  a  flattery  super- 
latively adroit  but  never  fawning.  Thus,  when 
at  The  Hague  in  16 14,  he  was,  wrongly  it  ap- 
pears, accused  of  having  caused  the  loss  of  Wesel 
by  dilatory  advice,  his  apology  to  the  King,  with 
its  play  on  James's  various  foibles,  is  as  shrewd 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  247 

a  document  as  has  often  been  sent  home  by  a 
suspected  minister : 

First,  I  was  bound  unto  your  Majesty  for  this  particular 
advertisement,  for  though  I  had  heard  before  of  some 
such  voice  bestowed  upon  me,  yet  I  could  gather  it  to  no 
head.  Next,  I  yield  your  Majesty  most  humble  thanks 
for  the  reservation  of  your  belief,  which  I  receive  as  an 
argument  of  your  favour  towards  me,  though  it  be  a  piece 
of  your  own  usual  and  natural  equity.  As  for  the  matter 
itself,  I  conceive  one  special  comfort  in  it,  that  they  who 
told  your  Majesty  how  Wesel  was  lost  by  my  securing  of 
the  States,  would  perchance  likewise  have  said  that  I  sold 
the  town  to  the  Archdukes,  if  my  honesty  had  been  as 
questionable  as  my  discretion.  But  these  and  the  like 
aspersions  are  the  proper  badges  of  public  servants, 
especially  in  democratical  regiments  [governments]  ; 
whereof  both  reason  and  examples  might  easily  be 
given,  if  it  did  not  more  concern  me  at  the  present  to 
rectify  my  poor  estimation  with  your  Majesty,  than  to 
search  the  nature  of  the  place.  .  .  . 

But  withal  Wotton  cannot  be  reckoned  among 
the  successful  diplomats.  It  is  perfectly  clear 
that  the  ■men2ide7idas  of  his  business  were  continu- 
ally irksome  to  him,  and  that  he  felt,  and  at  times 
even  expressed,  something  of  impatient  contempt 
for  the  political  contest  in  which  these  trivialities 
were  the  approved  weapons.  Like  Chesterfield 
in  the  next  century  his  heart  was  not  in  the 
game;  he  belonged  to  that  class  of  men  who  are 
more  concerned  with  their  decorous  progress 
through  the  pageantry  and  comedy  of  life  than 
with  the  issues  that  are  dividing  the  passions  of 


^48  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

others.  He  himself  was  certainl}^  aware  of  this 
aloofness,  as  we  may  conjecture  his  companions 
were  also  aware  of  it.  Not  modesty  alone  but 
some  touch  of  the  gentleman's  vanity  led  him  to 
say  that  all  he  had  observed  in  his  employments 
was  a  few  maxims  of  State  too  high  for  his  ca- 
pacity, and  too  subtle  for  his  nature,  which  was 
cast  in  a  plainer  mould ;  and  there  is  the  same 
proud  resignation  in  his  later  words  to  an  un- 
known friend  :  "  Nemo  te  melius  novit  quantulum 
legati  valeant  in  turbatis  temporibus."  One  gets 
the  impression  that,  except  where  questions  of 
religion  entered,  he  moved  through  the  scenes 
of  diplomacy  and  politics  more  as  an  amused 
spectator  than  as  a  participant.  He  was  for  a 
while  a  member  of  the  House  of  Commons,  and 
this  is  the  report  of  that  ofl&ce  he  sends  to  his 
nephew  : 

It  is  both  morally  and  naturally  true,  that  I  have  never 
been  in  perfect  health  and  cheerfulness  since  we  parted; 
but  I  have  entertained  my  mind,  when  my  body  would 
give  me  leave,  with  the  contemplation  of  the  strangest 
thing  that  ever  I  beheld,  commonly  called  in  our  language 
(as  I  take  it)  a  Parliament. 

That  was  the  so-called  "addled  Parliament"  in 
which  the  growing  distraction  of  the  age  vented 
itself  in  sound  and  fury,  prophetic  of  furious 
deeds  to  come.  Thomas  Wentworth,  afterwards 
the  great  Strafford,  and  John  Eliot  took  part  in 
that  brief,  stormy  session  of  1614  ;  can  one  im- 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  249 

agine  either  of  these  men  entertaining  his  mind 
with  the  contemplation  of  this  strangest  thing  ? 
Or,  to  return  to  Wotton's  more  regular  employ- 
ment as  a  diplomat,  read  through  his  letters  from 
The  Hague  during  the  Juliers-Cleves  embroglio. 
"  We  are  now  in  travail,"  he  writes  at  a  critical 
moment,  ' '  and  find  more  diflBculty  in  the  humours 
than  in  the  things  "  ;  it  is  clear  throughout  all 
his  record  here  of  talking  ambassadors  and 
marching  soldiers  that  the  humours  of  men  and 
the  comedy  of  the  intrigue  are  what  really  pique 
his  curiosity. 

Most  significant  of  all  for  understanding  his 
temperament  is  that  famous  viot  by  which  he  is 
still  popularly  remembered.  On  his  way  to  Venice 
in  1604,  to  take  charge  of  his  first  embassy,  he 
passed  through  Augsburg,  where  in  the  album  of 
a  friend  he  inscribed  his  full  name  and  office  : 
Henricus  Wotonhis,  Serenissimi  AyiglicB,  Scotics, 
Fra7ici£B,  et  HibernicB  Regis  Orator  prijnus  ad 
Venetos,  with  this  extraordinary  motto :  Legahis 
est  Vir  bo7ius,  peregr^  missus  ad  7nentiendum 
Reipub.  causa.  As  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith  observes, 
the  Latin,  missing  the  pun  of  the  EngHsh  :  "An 
ambassador  is  an  honest  man  sent  to  lie  abroad 
for  the  good  of  his  countr>% ' '  suggests  that  Wot- 
ton  merely  translated  the  witticism  for  the  occa- 
sion ;  it  may  well  have  been  an  old  joke  with 
him.  Nothing,  however,  came  of  the  indiscretion 
until  161 1,  when  Scioppius,  ribald  and  scurrilous 
beyond  the  license  of  the  times,  raked  it  up  for 


250  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

his  Ecclesiasticus,  an  attack  on  tlie  religion  and 
morals  of  James  I,  Who  could  trust  a  king,  he 
exclaimed  in  a  fine  indignation,  that  sent  his 
ministers  abroad  to  disseminate  lies  ?  And  as  for 
Wotton  himself,  he  was  like  the  wicked  man  of 
the  proverb  :  "  It  is  as  sport  to  a  fool  to  do  mis- 
chief" Wotton  defended  himself  in  a  public 
letter  by  showing  that  the  words  were  manifestly 
a  mere  idle  jest  among  friends,  but  his  royal 
master  was  incensed,  and  for  a  year  the  jester 
was  out  of  favour  with  King  and  court.  As  a 
matter  of  fact  he  was  probably,  for  his  trade  and 
his  generation,  too  little  skilled  in  lying.  It  was 
he  who  in  his  old  age,  to  one  about  to  commence 
ambassador,  as  Walton  relates  and  as  Bismarck 
was  in  our  day  to  recall,  "  smilingly  gave  this  for 
an  infallible  aphorism,  that,  to  be  in  safety  him- 
self, and  serviceable  to  his  country,  he  should 
always  and  upon  all  occasions  speak  the  truth  (it 
seems  a  State  paradox),  for  .  .  .  you  shall  never 
be  believed."  But  if  no  one  now  would  think 
seriously  of  impeaching  his  morality,  we  may 
observe  a  ticklish  note  of  irony  in  both  his 
witticisms  more  becoming  the  disinterested  gen- 
tleman than  one  walking  on  the  slippery 
stones  of  statecraft.  In  the  haven  of  Eton, 
"where  he  was  freed  from  all  corroding  cares, 
and  seated  on  such  a  rock  as  the  waves  of 
want  could  not  probably  shake,"  he  might 
safely  in  his  old  age,  as  Walton  says,  quoting 
Sir  William  Davenant, 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  25 1 

Laugh  at  the  graver  business  of  the  State, 
Which  speaks  men  rather  wise  than  fortunate  ; 

but  it  can  scarcely  be  doubted  that  his  wit,  while 
making  him  for  the  most  part  agreeable  person- 
ally to  James,  really  shut  him  out  from  political 
confidence  and  kept  him  discontented.  Even  at 
Venice,  where  he  found  not  only  the  comedy  of 
characters  to  amuse  him  and  the  splendours  of  art 
with  the  no  less  splendid  pageantry  of  life  to 
delight  his  eye,  but  also  the  deeper  problems  of 
religion  to  engage  his  heart,  he  could  write  to  a 
friend  despondingly  :  "  When  I  consider  how  all 
those  of  my  rank  have  been  dignified  and  bene- 
fited at  home,  while  I  have  been  gathering  of 
cockles  upon  this  lake,  I  am  in  good  faith  im- 
patient, more  of  the  shame,  than  of  the  sense  of 
want."  And  after  leaving  Venice  finally  he 
likened  himself  to  ' '  those  seal-fishes,  which  some- 
times, as  they  say,  oversleeping  themselves  in  an 
ebbing-water,  feel  nothing  about  them  but  a  dry 
shore  when  they  awake." 

But  there  was  something  more  in  Wotton  than 
this  felix  ciiriositas  which  kept  him  rather  wise 
than  fortunate.  Within  his  breast  were  wells  of 
unruflfled  contemplation,  the  inheritance  we  may 
suppose  of  his  Kentish  ancestors,  and  along  with 
that  restless  interest  in  the  spectacle  of  life,  so 
common  in  Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  days,  there 
went  the  no  less  characteristic  dallying  with  the 
seductions  of  repose.     It  was  probably  in  16 12, 


252  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

his  year  of  disgrace  after  the  exposure  of  Sciop- 
pius,  that  he  wrote  the  bravest  of  his  protests 
against  the  world,  that  immortal  Character  of  a 
Happy  Life  : 

How  happy  is  he  born  and  taught, 
That  serveth  not  another's  will  ; 
Whose  armour  is  his  honest  thought, 
And  simple  truth  his  utmost  skill ; 

Whose  passions  not  his  masters  are ; 
Whose  soul  is  still  prepared  for  death, 
Untied  unto  the  world  by  care 
Of  public  fame  or  private  breath ; 

Who  envies  none  that  chance  doth  raise. 
Nor  vice ;  who  never  understood 
How  deepest  wounds  are  given  by  praise; 
Nor  rules  of  state,  but  rules  of  good; 

Who  hath  his  life  from  rumours  freed ; 
Whose  conscience  is  his  strong  retreat ; 
Whose  state  can  neither  flatterers  feed, 
Nor  ruin  make  oppressors  great; 

Who  God  doth  late  and  early  pray 
More  of  his  grace  than  gifts  to  lend ; 
And  entertains  the  harmless  day 
With  a  religious  book,  or  friend. 

This  man  is  freed  from  servile  bands 
Of  hope  to  rise  or  fear  to  fall  : 
Lord  of  himself,  though  not  of  lands. 
And,  having  nothing,  yet  hath  all. 

It  is  a  note  struck  many  times  before  Sir  Henry 
Wotton's  day  and  caught  up  from  him  by  in- 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  253 

numerable  poets  since  then.  While  reading  that 
poem  one  thinks  of  what  is  perhaps  the  latest  echo 
of  it  in  our  own  age,  the  defiant  lines  of  W.  E. 
Henley : 

Beyond  this  place  of  wrath  and  tears 
Looms  but  the  Horror  of  the  shade, 

And  yet  the  menace  of  the  years 
Finds,  and  shall  find,  me  unafraid. 

It  matters  not  how  strait  the  gate, 

How  charged  with  punishments  the  scroll, 

I  am  the  master  of  my  fate  : 
I  am  the  captain  of  my  soul. 

Whose  passions  not  his  7nasters  are  !  By  the  side 
of  that  calm  strength  and  that  clear-eyed  sub- 
mission to  providence  is  it  too  much  to  say  that 
this  tortured  challenge  is  but  a  poor  bit  of  fan- 
faronade after  all?  Defiance  is  a  passion  like 
another,  even  a  tawdry  and  insubstantial  thing 
for  the  most  part,  and  in  this  rebellious  cry 
against  fate  a  man  may  forget  that  he  is  still  a 
slave  to  his  own  ignoble  self.  It  was  not  in  such 
a  spirit  that  the  Elizabethan  prayed  to  be  Lord  of 
himself,  but  in  the  large  humility  of  self-know- 
ledge, wherewith  by  comparison  the  romantic 
revolt  of  modern  song  is  but  a  feverish  tossing 
within  the  bondage  of  egotism. 

For  it  must  not  be  supposed  that  the  true 
source  of  Wotton's  poem  was  any  pique  at  his 
temporary  disgrace  with  fortune  and  men's  eyes ; 
rather  it  came  from  that  self-recollection  which 


2  54  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

lie  carried  with  him  through  all  the  contrarie- 
ties of  life's  game.  Nor  should  we  forget  how 
common  was  this  spirit  in  those  days.  Before 
Wotton  had  come  to  the  age  of  reflection,  Thomas 
Lord  Vaux  had  written  of  contentment : 

When  all  is  done  and  said, 

In  the  end  thus  shall  you  find, 

He  most  of  all  doth  bathe  in  bliss 
That  hath  a  quiet  mind; 

and  Wotton  differed  from  many  of  his  contempo- 
raries chiefly  in  this,  that  the  years  gave  him  at 
last  what  they  sighed  for  but  never  attained,  or, 
attaining,  threw  away.  He  at  least  might  have 
said  with  truth : 

I  can  be  well  content 
The  sweetest  time  of  all  my  life 
To  deem  in  thinking  spent. 

That  sweetest  time  came  to  him  when,  in  1624, 
as  a  recognition  of  his  scholarship  and  character 
and  partly  perhaps  as  an  offset  for  public  moneys 
due  him,  he  was  appointed  Provost  of  Eton  Col- 
lege, in  which  little  world  he  lived  and  ruled 
until  his  death  fifteen  years  later. 

If  any  connection  be  sought  between  his  diplo- 
matic and  academic  careers  it  may  be  found  in 
the  inscription  for  the  painting  of  Venice  by 
Fialetti  which  still  stands  in  the  Provost's  large 
dining  hall :  "  Henricus  Wottonius,  post  tres  apud 
Venetos  legationes  ordinarias,  iti  Etonefisis  Collegii 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  255 

beato  sinu  senescens,  eiusque,  cmn  suavissima  inter 
se  sociosque  concordia,  annos  iaui  12  prafedus,  haiic 
miram  urbis  quasi  natantis  effigicm  in  aliquant  sui 
memoriam  iuxta  socialem  mensani  affixit.  16^6.''^ 
The  world,  it  need  not  be  said,  was  not  entirely 
cut  off  from  him  in  the  happy  bosom  of  his  col- 
lege. One  of  his  most  beautiful  letters  was  sent 
thence,  with  a  book  on  fish-ponds  which  had  been 
promised  at  Medley's,  the  fashionable  "  ordinary" 
in  Milford  I^ane,  to  Sir  Thomas  Wentworth,  in 
1628: 

.  .  .  Sorry  I  am  not  to  be  at  London,  when  my 
noblest  friends  are  there.  And  yet  what  should  I,  that 
am  of  so  small  influence,  do  at  those  great  conjunctions  ? 
We  poor  cloistered  men  are  best  in  our  own  cells; 
qncedani  plantce,  saith  Pliny,  gaudent  umbra.  Yet  there 
do  still  hang,  I  know  not  how,  upon  me,  some  relics  of 
an  hearkening  humour;  and  if  I  could,  in  a  line  or  two, 
be  favoured  with  your  judgment  of  the  event  of  this 
Parliament,  I  should  think  myself  better  resolved  than  if 
I  had  gone  to  ask  that  question  at  Delphos ;  though  I 
could  rather  wish  this  turned  into  a  greater  favour,  and 
that  my  ever-honoured  Lord  Clifford,  yourself,  and  Sir 
Gervas  Clifton — that  is,  the  Medley  Triplicity — would 
at  some  of  your  playing  and  breathing  days,  take  in 
some  of  this  fresh  air.  A  little  interposing  of  philo- 
sophical diet  may  perchance  somewhat  lighten  the  spirits 
of  men  overcharged  with  public  thoughts,  and  prevent  a 
surfeit  of  state. 

That  hearkening  hwnour  was  a  phrase  which  he 
did  not  let  fall  without  repeating  in  another  let- 
ter;   and  elsewhere  he  confessed  that,  having 


256  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

spent  SO  mucti  of  his  age  "  among  noise  abroad 
and  seven  years  thereof  in  the  Court  at  home," 
he  was  still  subject  to  "  a  certain  concupiscence 
of  novelties." 

There  was  the  business  of  the  college  also  to 
occupy  him,  not  always  a  light  matter,  when  men 
of  influence  importunately  demanded  scholarships 
for  their  sons.  Discipline  must  be  maintained, 
and  indeed  was  something  more  than  main- 
tained according  to  the  account  of  John  Evelyn. 
"  My  father,"  writes  that  diarist  for  1632,  "would 
willingly  have  weaned  me  from  my  fondness  of 
my  too  indulgent  grandmother,  intending  to  have 
placed  me  at  Eton ;  but  I  was  so  terrified  at  the 
report  of  the  severe  discipline  there,  that  I  was 
sent  back  to  Lewes,  which  perverseness  of  mine 
I  have  since  a  thousand  times  deplored."  And 
so  by  a  grandmother's  indulgence  and  a  boy's 
perversity  we  have  missed  the  chance  of  another 
contemporary  portrait  of  Provost  Wotton.  But 
still  more  to  the  master's  heart  than  sheer  dis- 
cipline was,  we  suspect,  the  opportunity  of  work- 
ing by  hidden  means  upon  the  boys  of  finer 
nature.  "For  in  this  Royal  Seminary,"  he 
writes,  "we  are  in  one  thing,  and  only  in  one, 
like  the  Jesuits,  that  we  all  joy  when  we  get  a 
spirit  upon  whom  much  may  be  built."  And 
not  the  least  noble  of  his  pupils,  Sir  Robert 
Boyle,  described  him  as  "  a  person  that  was  not 
only  a  fine  gentleman  himself,  but  very  well 
skilled  in  the  art  of  making  others  so." 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  257 

With  the  business  of  the  school  went  also  the 
opportunity  of  teaching  by  books.  In  the  year 
of  his  appointment  he  had  published  The  Ele- 
ments of  Architecture,  an  attempt  to  guide  to 
noble  ends  the  introduction  of  Italian  art  into 
England,  and  for  the  rest  of  his  life  various  learned 
designs,  most  of  which  were  never  executed,  seem 
to  have  flattered  his  fancy.  One  of  these,  A 
Philosophical  Survey  of  Ediicatio7i  (1630  ?),  has  the 
largeness  of  view  we  should  expect  from  him,  and 
is  not  without  permanent  value.  Formal  religion, 
too,  had  its  claims  upon  his  time.  Soon  after 
accepting  the  ofl&ce  of  Provost,  he  entered  into 
holy  orders,  though  modesty  and  some  reticence 
of  spirit  kept  him  from  proceeding  further  than 
the  degree  of  deacon.  To  the  King,  then  Charles 
I. ,  he  accounted  for  his  conduct  in  one  of  his  most 
characteristic  letters.  "God  knows,"  he  ex- 
claims, ' '  the  nearer  I  approach  to  contemplate 
His  greatness,  the  more  I  tremble  to  assume  any 
cure  of  souls  even  in  the  lowest  degree,  that  were 
bought  at  so  high  a  price.  .  .  .  This  I  conceive 
to  be  a  piece  of  mine  own  character ;  so  as  my 
private  study  must  be  my  theatre  rather  than  a 
pulpit,  and  my  books  my  auditors,  as  they  are 
all  my  treasure."  Yet  his  humility  in  things 
holy  was  not  inconsistent  with  human  pride.  By 
his  example,  he  thought,  the  sons  of  gentlemen 
and  knights  would  "  not  be  ashamed,  after  the 
sight  of  courtly  weeds,  to  put  on  a  surplice." 
For  himself  he  had  every  year  more  need  of  the 

»7 


258  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

secret  consolations  of  faith.  One  by  one  the 
friends  and  relatives,  with  whom  he  had  so  mag- 
nificently shared  his  life,  dropped  away,  yielding, 
as  he  wrote  plaintively  a  little  before  his  own 
death,  "  to  the  seigniory  and  sovereignty  of  time." 
While  into  the  growing  loneliness  of  his  study 
there  entered  the  rumours,  rather  the  first  dismal 
blasts,  of  the  gathering  political  storm.  ' '  Never, ' ' 
he  writes  in  April  of  1639,  "  was  there  such  a 
stamping  and  blending  of  rebellion  and  religion 
together."  Happily  for  him  he  was  himself 
within  a  few  months  beyond  the  noise  of  these 
drums  and  tramplings,  out  of  reach  of  any  con- 
quest of  men.  How  grievously  he  felt  the 
contentions  of  the  age  may  be  known  from  the 
epitaph  by  order  of  his  will  engraved  on  his 
tomb  : 

Hie  iacet  huius  Sententise  primus  Author. 

DISPUTANDI    PRURITUS   FIT  ECCI.ESI- 
ARUM  SCABIES. 

Nomen  alias  quaere. 

Which  Walton  translates:  "Here  lies  the  first 
author  of  this  sentence  :  The  itch  of  disputation 
will  prove  the  scab  of  the  church.  Inquire  his 
name  elsewhere." 

But  these  losses  and  forebodings  came  to  him 
when  he  had  himself  ' '  arrived  near  those  years 
which  lie  in  the  suburbs  of  oblivion."  For  the 
most  part  his  days  at  Eton,  as  we  see  them  de- 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  259 

picted  in  his  letters,  slipped  by  in  the  enjoyment 
of  that  sheltered  quiet  for  which  he  had  always 
yearned — ayihnas fieri  sapientiores  quiescendo.  A nd 
quite  in  accord  with  the  letters  is  the  ever-delight- 
ful picture  Walton  has  left  of  his  friend's  busy 
peace  : 

And  now  to  speak  a  little  of  the  employment  of  his 
time  in  the  College.  After  his  customary  public  devo- 
tions, his  use  was  to  retire  into  his  study  and  there  to 
spend  some  hours  in  reading  the  Bible  and  authors  in 
divinity,  closing  up  his  meditations  with  private  prayer  ; 
this  was,  for  the  most  part,  his  employment  in  the  fore- 
noon. But  when  he  was  once  sate  to  dinner,  then 
nothing  but  cheerful  thoughts  possessed  his  mind,  and 
those  still  increased  by  constant  company  at  his  table  of 
such  persons  as  brought  thither  additions  both  of  learn- 
ing and  pleasure  ;  but  some  part  of  most  days  was  usually 
spent  in  philosophical  conclusions.  Nor  did  he  forget 
his  innate  pleasure  of  angling,  which  he  would  usually 
call  his  idle  time  not  idly  spent ;  saying  often,  he  would 
rather  live  five  May  months  than  forty  Decembers.  .  .  . 

He  was  a  constant  cherisher  of  all  those  youths  in  that 
school,  in  whom  he  found  either  a  constant  diligence  or 
a  genius  that  prompted  them  to  learning ;  for  whose 
encouragement  he  was  (beside  many  other  things  of 
necessity  and  beauty)  at  the  charge  of  setting  up  in  it 
two  rows  of  pillars,  on  which  he  caused  to  be  choicely 
drawn  the  pictures  of  divers  of  the  most  famous  Greek 
and  Latin  historians,  poets,  and  orators;  persuading 
them  not  to  neglect  rhetoric  because  Almighty  God 
has  left  mankind  aflfections  to  be  wrought  upon.  And 
he  would  often  say  that  none  despised  eloquence  but 
such  dull  souls  as  were  not  capable  of  it.  He  would 
also  often  make  choice  of  some  observations  out  of  those 


2  6o  SHELBURNE    ESSAYS 

historians  and  poets ;  and  would  never  leave  the  school 
without  dropping  some  choice  Greek  or  I,atin  apothegm 
or  sentence,  that  might  be  worthy  of  a  room  in  the 
memory  of  a  growing  scholar. 

Several  meetings  out  of  these  latter  days  have 
been  recorded  and  are  among  the  memorable 
scenes  of  our  literary  history.  Most  celebrated 
of  all  is  that  day  when  John  Milton  came  from 
Horton  to  pay  his  respects  to  the  famous  Provost 
of  Eton  and  to  inquire  about  travelling  in  Italy, 
whither  the  young  poet  was  turning  his  thoughts. 
Then  came  a  gift  of  Comus  to  Wotton  and  in 
reply  a  letter  of  thanks  and  advice.  How  the 
tried  connoisseur  praised  in  that  letter  the  ravish- 
ing Doric  delicacy  of  Milton's  songs,  every  lover 
of  Milton  knows ;  it  is  not  surprising  that  the 
recipient  of  such  praise  kept  the  document  and 
printed  it  in  the  first  volume  of  his  collected 
poems.  There  is  for  us  an  interest  of  another 
sort  in  finding  Wotton  impart  to  the  intending 
traveller  the  ' '  Delphian  oracle ' '  which  he  had 
made  the  rule  of  his  own  life  and  which  in  an- 
other age  Chesterfield  was  to  reiterate  so  often  to 
his  son:  I peyisieri  stretti  e  il  viso  sciolto.  That 
day  when  Wotton  and  Milton  came  together  is 
marked  with  white  in  our  annals,  but  many 
readers,  if  such  choice  were  granted  to  fancy, 
would  almost  choose  rather  to  have  been  present 
that  time  that  Izaak  Walton  sat  by  his  courtly 
friend  on  the  river's  bank,  as  it  is  celebrated  in 
The  Compleat  Angler : 


SIR    HENRY    WOTTON  261 

And  I  do  easily  believe  that  peace  and  patience  and  a 
calm  content  did  cohabit  in  the  cheerful  heart  of  Sir 
Henry  Wotton ;  because  I  know  that  when  he  was  be- 
yond seventy  years  of  age  he  made  this  description  of  a 
part  of  the  present  pleasure  that  possessed  him,  as  he  sat 
quietly  in  a  summer's  evening,  on  a  bank  a-fishing.  It 
is  a  description  of  the  spring,  which,  because  it  glided  as 
soft  and  sweetly  from  his  pen,  as  that  river  does  at  this 
time,  by  which  it  was  then  made,  I  shall  repeat  it  unto 
you: 

This  day  dame  Nature  seem'd  in  love ; 

The  lusty  sap  began  to  move ; 

Fresh  juice  did  stir  the  embracing  vines ; 

And  birds  had  drawn  their  valentines. 

The  jealous  trout,  that  low  did  lie, 

Rose  at  a  well-dissembled  fly ; 

There  stood  my  friend,  with  patient  skill, 

Attending  of  his  trembling  quill.  .  .  . 

It  is  pleasant  to  leave  him  thus  with  his  song 
unfinished  and  his  creel  unfilled,  and  to  reflect  on 
the  full  orbit  of  his  life  from  the  Kentish  birth- 
place at  Bocton  Malherbe,  through  the  crowded 
courts  of  many  lands,  to  the  peaceful  river  bank 
with  a  friend. 


THE  END 


The  Works  and  Letters 

of 

Charles  and  Mary  Lamb 

Edited  by  E.  V.  LUCAS 

7  volumes.    Octavo.    Very  fully  illustrated.    Each, 

net,  $2,25 

The  Works  are  divided  as  follows  : 
I. — Miscellaneous  Prose.     179S-1834. 

II.— The  Essays  of  Elia  and  The  Last  Essays 

of  Elia. 
III. — Books  for  Children. 
IV. — Dramatic  Specimens. 
V. — Poems  and  Plays. 
VI.  and  VII.— The  Letters. 

The  Lucas  edition  of  the  works  of  Charles  and  Mary  Lamb 
is  now  complete  in  seven  octavo  volumes,  the  sixth  and 
seventh  being  devoted  to  the  letters  of  the  Lambs.  Mr.  E. 
V.  Lucas  is  recognized  as  the  authority  on  the  Lambs,  and  his 
skilful  arrangement  and  illuminating  notes  make  this  set 
certain  of  acceptance  as  the  standard  library  edition.  The 
last  two  volumes,  covering  the  correspondence,  contain  many 
hitherto  unpublished  letters  written  by  Charles  Lamb  and  his 
sister  Mary,  whose  letters  are  now  for  the  first  time  included 
with  those  of  her  brother.  Charles  Lamb  was  a  ready  and 
brilliant  letter-writer,  and  his  letters  to  his  close  friends  such 
as  Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  and  Southey,  with  the  editor's 
connecting  notes,  form  almost  a  complete  record  of  some  of 
the  most  interesting  portions  of  his  life.  For  their  intimacy 
and  frankness  Lamb's  letters  may  be  likened  to  those  of 
Stevenson  in  our  own  time  and  they  deserve  equal  popularity. 


Send  for  Illustrated  Descriptive  Circular 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S   SONS 
New  York  London 


Shelburne  Essays 

By  Paul  Elmer  More 

5  vols.     Crown  octavo. 
Sold  separately.     Net,  $1.25.     (By  mail,  $1.35) 

Contents 

First  Series  :  A  Hermit's  Notes  on  Thoreau — The  Soli- 
tude of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  —  The  Origins  of  Haw- 
thorne and  Poe — The  Influence  of  Emerson — The  Spirit 
of  Carlyle  —  The  Science  of  English  Verse  —  Arthur 
Symons  :  The  Two  Illusions — The  Epic  of  Ireland — 
Two  Poets  of  the  Irish  Movement — Tolstoy ;  or,  The 
Ancient  Feud  between  Philosophy  and  Art — The  Re- 
ligious Ground  of  Humanitarianism. 

Second  Series  :  Elizabethan  Sonnets — Shakespeare's  Son- 
nets— Lafcadio  Hearn — The  First  Complete  Edition  of 
Hazlitt  —  Charles  Lamb — Kipling  and  FitzGerald  — 
George  Crabbe  —  The  Novels  of  George  Meredith  — 
Hawthorne:  Looking  before  and  after — Delphi  and 
Greek  Literature — Nemesis  :  or,  The  Divine  Envy. 

Third  Series  :  The  Correspondence  of  William  Cowper — 
Whittier  the  Poet — The  Centenary  of  Sainte-Beuve — 
The  Scotch  Novels  and  Scotch  History — Swinburne — 
Christina  Rossetti — Why  is  Browning  Popular? — A  Note 
on  Byron's  "Don  Juan" — Laurence  Sterne — J.  Henry 
Shorthouse — The  Quest, 

Fourth  Series  :  The  "Vicar  of  Morwenstow — Fanny  Bur- 
ney— A  Note  on  "  Daddy  "  Crisp — George  Herbert — John 
Keats — Benjamin  Franklin — Charles  Lamb  Again — Walt 
Whitman — William  Blake— The  Theme  of  Paradise  Lost 
— The  Letters  of  Horace  Walpole. 

Fifth  Series  :  The  Greek  Anthology  —  The  Praise  of 
Dickens — George  Gissiiig — Mrs.  Gaskell — Philip  Freneau 
— Thoreau's  Journal — The  Centenary  of  Longfellow — 
Donald  G.  Mitchell— James  Thomson  (  "  B.  V.")-Ches- 
terfield — Sir  Henry  Watton. 


A  Few  Press  Criticisms  on 
Shelburne  Essays 

••  It  is  a  pleasure  to  hail  in  Mr.  More  a  genuine  critic,  for 
genuine  critics  in  America  in  these  days  are  uncommonly 
scarce.  .  .  .  We  recommend,  as  a  sample  of  his  breadth, 
style,  acumen,  and  power  the  essay  on  Tolstoy  in  the  present 
volume.  That  represents  criticism  that  has  not  merely 
a  metropolitan  but  a  world  note.  .  .  .  One  is  thoroughly 
grateful  to  Mr.  More  for  the  high  quality  of  his  thought,  his 
serious  purpose,  and  his  excellent  style." — Harvard  Gradu- 
ates*  Magazine. 

"We  do  not  know  of  any  one  now  writing  who  gives 
evidence  of  a  better  critical  equipment  than  Mr.  More.  It 
is  rare  nowadays  to  find  a  writer  so  thoroughly  familiar  with 
both  ancient  and  modern  thought.  It  is  this  width  of  view, 
this  intimate  acquaintance  with  so  much  of  the  best  that  has 
been  thought  and  said  in  the  world,  irrespective  of  local 
prejudice,  that  constitute  Mr.  More's  strength  as  a  critic. 
He  has  been  able  to  form  for  himself  a  sound  literary  canon 
and  a  sane  philosophy  of  life  which  constitute  to  our  mind 
his  peculiar  merit  as  a  critic." — Independent. 

"He  is  familiar  with  classical,  Oriental,  and  English 
literature;  he  uses  a  temperate,  lucid,  weighty,  and  not 
ungraceful  style  ;  he  is  aware  of  his  best  predecessors,  and  is 
apparently  on  the  way  to  a  set  of  philosophic  principles 
which  should  lead  him  to  a  high  and  perhaps  influential 
place  in  criticism,  .  .  .  We  believe  that  we  are  in  the 
presence  of  a  critic  who  must  be  counted  among  the  first  who 
take  literature  and  life  for  their  theme." — London  Speaker, 


G.   P.   Putnam's  Sons 
New  York  London 


A  Sterling  Piece  of  Literary  Work 

THE   NOVELS   OF   HENRY   JAMES 

BY 

ELISABETH    LUTHER   GARY 

Author  of  "The  Rossettis,''  "William  Morris,  "  etc. 

With  a  Bibliography  by  Frederick  A.  King 

Crown  octavo.     With  Portrait  in  Photogravure. 
Net,  |i.2s    (By  mail,  $1.35) 

All  of  Miss  Gary's  work  in  biography  and  criti- 
cism is  marked  by  the  distinct  note  of  appre- 
ciation. In  such  a  spirit  she  brings  her  reader 
into  close  touch  with  the  mental  and  spiritual  traits 
of  each  author,  and  leaves  him  with  a  deeper  im- 
pression of  the  general  influences  of  the  subject 
chosen  for  study.  In  her  latest  volume,  a  critical 
interpretation  of  the  novels  of  Mr.  Henry  James, 
she  has  a  theme  well  suited  to  her  powers  of  in- 
sight and  illumination,  and  as  a  trained  writer,  a 
student  of  character  and  literature,  Miss  Gary  is 
well  equipped  for  her  congenial  task. 

The  intention  of  the  book  is  sufficiently  indi- 
cated by  its  title.  It  is  an  attempt  to  fix  more  or 
less  definitely  the  impression  given  by  the  work  of 
Mr.  James  taken  as  a  whole  accomplishment  and 
reviewed  with  reference  to  its  complete  efi^ect.  It 
is  not  so  much  a  criticism  as  a  comment  upon 
the  author's  point  of  view  and  the  inferences  he 
draws  from  life.  An  exhaustive  bibliography  com- 
piled by  Frederick  A.  King,  arranged  logically  as 
well  as  chronologically,  completes  a  remarkably  in- 
teresting and  well  rounded  piece  of  contemporary 
criticism.  

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

NEW  YORK  LONDON 


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